
KASTKIIX (iA15Li: OF THE OLD STONE HOUSE 
From a photograph by Percy Moran. 



THE 



STORY OF AN OLD FARM 



^aww— —WM— iiMioni- 



OR 



Life in New Jersey in the Eighteenth, 
Century 

By ANDREW D. MELLICK, Jr. 



WITH A GENEALOGICAL APPENDIX 



XLbc TIlnioni0t=(5a3ette 
SonierviUe, IKlew Jersey 

1889. 



JAN 3 1907 






Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1889, by 

ANDREW D. MELLICK, Jr., 

of Plainfield. New Jersey, in the office of the Librarian of Congpress, at Washington. 



f»re:kace:. 



WHEN the writing of the "Story of an Old Farm" was 
undertaken it was not anticipated that the completed 
volume would find readers beyond a limited circle. The narra- 
tive it was supposed would prove interesting only to the descend- 
ants of the founder of the homestead which had been the 
inspiration of its pages, and, perhaps, also, to a few local read- 
ers. But as the work progressed its scope broadened, until 
the compilation gradually assumed a character calculated to 
interest lovers and students of general history. Finally, valuable 
material accumulating, the author found embodied in the chapters 
so much fresh information relating to colonial and Revolutionary 
times in New Jersey as to warrant his seeking readers beyond 
the realm of kinsfolk and township residents. It was still neces- 
sary to preserve the original plan of the narrative, but it is hoped 
that the general reader will take in good part, and not find 
objectionable, the slight filament of family annals that runs through 
the successive chapters. After all, it is but a gossamer thread, 
and one that has served an excellent purpose — now as a silken 
clue to the labyrinth of historical research, and always as the 
continuous cord upon which has crystallized a mass of interesting 
facts, traditions and incidents, illustrative of times and customs 
now long bygone. 

If there is any virtue in writing from an inward impulse , the 
pages of the "Story of an Old Farm" should furnish easy read- 
ing and bear the marks of a "free and joyous expression." 
Though not by birth a son of the soil, heredity, environment 
and sympathy had made the author a Jerseyman to the core, 
and in telling the story of this old Somerset farm he brought to 



iv The Story of an Old Farm. 

the task an enthusiastic love for the subject. Throughout boy- 
liood and youth all summers were passed in Bedminster township, 
in which this ancestral plantation is located ; thus was imbibed a 
deep affection for its waving grain fields, breezy uplands, broad 
meadows and babbling streams — an affection that has grown with 
each year of later life. This love for its physical aspects and 
natural beauties inspired a corresponding interest in, and regard 
for, the memories of those men and women of previous generations 
who had passed their lives on this old homestead. So it was that 
a desire for investigation and research was incited, tending to 
divulge all that could be learned of the daily walk and conversa- 
tion, not only of such persons as had called the " Old Stone 
House " home, but of their contemporaries throughout the county 
and state. This resulted in the collection of material that, though 
the writing of this book was not in contemplation at the time, 
ultimately powerfully promoted the completion of the work. 

All of the foregoing is not properly a preface but an explana- 
tion. The true preface is to be found in the two chapters that 
open the story. They will tell of this Jersey homestead and its 
early founder, and make plain the inspiration of this volume. 
And yet, all things considered, it is for these opening pages that 
the reader's most indulgent criticism is desired. The book con- 
tains forty chapters. Of thirty-eight but little apprehension is 
felt as to their accuracy, for the statements therein have been 
subjected to the most rigid tests of severe scrutiny and repeated 
investigation. But for Chapters I. and II. it is confessed that 
allowances must be made. The picture they present of the farm, 
of its approach, and of the surrounding country, is painted by 
the hand of affection — an artist always prone to be too lavish 
with color. Scenes that were witnessed by the boyish eyes of 
nearly thirty years ago are now reproduced with a faithfulness 
that is of the past, rather than of the i)resent. While writing 
these chapters the walls of the author's chamber, under the touch 
of a loving remembrance, fell away, disclosing the sunny slope of 
a Somerset hill on which an old country house, with low eaves 
and thick stone walls, lies back from the meadows that border 
the north branch of the Raritan river, just where Peapack brook 
loses itself in that stream. This sturdy dwelling — seen with the 
eyes of memory — has a wealth of old-fashioned accessories, and 



Preface. v 

its surroundings are in perfect keeping with its happy expres- 
sions of utilitarian simplicity and homely .picturesqueness. The 
short, thick turf of its dooryard is shaded by contemplative elms, 
and studded with tall, bulbous bushes of box and roses of Sharon. 
At its eastern gable, in an ancient garden, bloom hereditary lilies, 
sweet peas and many-colored asters. The little windows that 
pierce the western gable survey a colony of barns, haymows and 
strawricks ; while still beyond, an old orchard flanks the high- 
way which creeps up a long hill until it disappears over its crest, 
a quarter of a mile, or more, away. Plenteous harvests gladden 
the fields, fleecy sheep whiten the hillsides, cattle, deep in the 
clover of the meadows, are steeped in sweet content, while in 
the house, at the barns and on the surrounding acres is to be 
heard the voice of happy industry. This is memory's picture — 
one full of cherished associations. Now, alas, all is changed ! 
Adversity and the grave have played sad havoc with the aspect 
and condition of the "Old Farm," and a visitor would look in 
vain for much that is apparently promised by these pages. 

The warmest acknowledgments of the author are due to the 
many persons who by their knowledge and advice have aided in 
the preparation of this work. To enumerate them all would be 
to present a formidable list of coadjutors. It would be the sum of 
ingratitude, however, not to express the deep sense of obligations 
he is under to Doctor John C. Honeyman of New Germautown, 
N. J., whose patience and kindness have been unremitting. In 
the genealogical appendix his help has been invaluable, and the 
chapter treating of Zion Lutheran church would have been a 
mere skeleton of its present proportions without the information 
he has furnished. In many other ways the "Story of an Old 
Farm" has greatly benefited by Doctor Honeyman's intimate 
acquaintance with New Jersey's colonial and Revolutionary his- 
tory. It is also desired to make particular mention of the 
valuable services freely given by William P. Sutphen, Esq., 
of Bedminster township — a life-long resident on the "Old Farm" 
and an antiquarian by nature and habit. To him the author is 
indebted for many original papers, and much interesting lore 
regarding the old people and times of Bedminster. Much has 
also been learned from Adjutant-General William S. Stryker of 
Trenton, an eminent authority as to New Jersey's Revolutionary 



vi The Story of an Old Farm. 

period — from William Nelson, Esq. and the Honorable Frederick 
W. Rieord of the State Historical Society — and from the Reverend 
Henry P. Thompson of Readington, N. J. Efficient aid has been 
funiishcd by Charles W. Opdyke, Esq. of Plainfield, N. J., 
William O. McDowell Esq. of Newark, N. J., and the late 
S. L. M. Barlow, Esq. of New York, the latter having kindly 
placed at the author's disposal his valuable library of Americana. 
Here is also the proper place to recognize the courtesy of the 
editors of the Magazine of American History^ the Pennsylvania 
Magazine of History and Biography, and the New Torh Evening 
Post, who have permitted the reproduction in this volume of 
considerable matter that has already appeared in their columns. 

On the coming pages there will be found numerous statements 
of a historical nature, sonic of which have not before been pub- 
lished, while many of them appear for the first time in a con- 
secutive or connected form or order. In reaching information 
that may appear fresh and new naturally some readers will 
deplore the omission of foot notes containing references to 
authorities. To such persons it is desired to explain that much 
care has been taken in preserving and tabulating the titles of 
books, the names of authors and individuals, and the evidence, 
generally, upon which all facts and statements, new or old, con- 
tained herein are based. The writer will at any time cheerfully 
turn to these notes in order to answer personal applications for 
sources of information. In addition, a very comprehensive list 
of authorities will be found in the appendix. 

And now ends this long and very personal prologue. The bell 
rings ! The curtain rises on the first scene, showing the Peapack 
stage, with horses harnessed and luggage strapped, only waiting 
for you, reader, to start for the '' Old Farm." 
Plainfield, New Jersey, October 23, 1889. 



CONTKNTTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

The Peapack Stage — Sunday Morning at Bedminster Church — A 
Retired Hamlet. 1-11. 
From Somerville to Bedminster — Scenes on the Way — A Loquacious Stage- 
driver — An Ancient Tavern — The Blue Hills— The Revolutionary Village of 
Pluckamin — A Picturesque Ford — Van der Veer's Mills — The Venerable Church 
of Bedminster — Incidents of a Morning Service — The Foot-Path through the 
Graveyard — A Motley Array of Vehicles — The Small Boy and the Delightful 
Old Lady — The Village of the Lesser Cross Eoads — Rusty Houses and Old- 
Fashioned Gardens — A Queer Little Shop — Wiseacres at the Village Store — The 
Old Schoolhouse — Boyish Reminiscences — The Admonitory Gad — The Mine 
Brook Swimming Hole — Over the Hills to the Old Farm. 



CHAPTER n. 

The Old Farm — Its Upland Acres, Broad Meadows, and Ancient 
Stone Homestead. 12-21. 
Walking North Fi-om the Village — Observations by the Way — The Charms 
of a Country Road — A Neglected God's-acre — The Confines of the Old Farm — 
A Royal Grove — The Landscape Full of Sentiment and Beauty — A Buoyant 
Country, and Grassy Cascades — The Outlook From the Long Hill — Summer 
Vegetation and the Lovely Mystery of Color — The Brawling Peapack Brook — 
A Grand Old Maple — The Old Stone House Rests on a Sunny Bank of Turf — 
Its Comely, Quaint Presence, and Wealth of Old-fashioned Accessories — A 
Charming Rural Picture — The Interior a Bit of the Old World — The Outer 
Kitchen and Dutch Oven — The Founders of This Old Homestead in 1752 — 
Why Their Story is Told in These Pages. 



CHAPTER III. 

Bendorf on t^he Rhine — Johannes Moelich Emigrates to America — 
The Condition of Germany in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth 
Centuries. 22-34. 
Coblentz and its Ancient Town Wall— The Vast Fortification of Erhenbriet- 

stein — Terraced Vineyards and Valleys Stored with Legend and Romance — 



viii The Story of an Old Farm. 

Bendorf Surrounded by Apple Orchards — The Aspect and Architecture of the 
Town — One of the Oldest Churches in Germany — The Home of Johannes Moe- 

lick and His Wife Mariah Katrina — He Sets Sail for America The Great 

German Exodus and its Cause — German Happiness Before the Thirty Years' 
War — The Miseries of that Contest — The Country People Fly From Their Dis- 
mantled Villages and Wasted Lands — Peace Banquets are Spread in 1648 — But 
Little Comfort Comes to the Rhine Valley — Subsequent Continental Wars — 
Louis XIV. Devastates the Palatinate — Despotic Princes, Petty Persecutions and 
Cruel Conscriptions — The German Turns His Back on Fatherland — The Great 
Flootl of Emigration to America. 



CHAPTER IV. 

German Expatriation— The Distribution of Teuton Emigrants in the 
American Colonies. 35-49. 
First Movement to America — William Penn and Pennsylvania — Pastorious 
Settles Germantown — Neuwied — Settlement of the German Valley in New Jer- 
sey — Newburgh Founded by Kockerthal — The Great Hegira to England in 1709 
— Cause of the Movement — Camping on Blackheath — Thirty Eight Hundred 
Palatines Remove to Ireland — The Sufferings of Heidelberg — Emigrants from 
Heidelberg Found Newbern, North Carolina — Governor Robert Hunter — Ten 
Ship Loads of Palatines Brought by Him to New York — Settlement at Living- 
ston Manor on the Hudson, and in Scoharie, Montgomery, and Herkimer Coun- 
ties, New York — Disatisfaction of the Colonists with Their Treatment by the 
New York Authorities — Pennsylvania Grows in Favor with Emigrants — Arri- 
vals between 1700 and the Revolution. 



CHAPTER V. 

Johannes Moelich Reaches Pennsylvania in 1735 — His Experiences 
In Philadelphia And Germantown. 50-64. 
The Crooked Billet Wharf — Arrival of the Ship Mercury with Johannes 
Moelich — The Aspect and Area of the City — Johann Peter Moelich — Impres- 
sions on Landing — A Walk on Chestnut Street — A Gang of Newly Imported 
Negroes — The Slave Auction — Colonial Houses — Quaint Interiors — Dogs as 
Meat Roasters — Whipped at a Cart's Tail — Stocks and Pillory — Flinging Eggs 
at Malefiictors — The New State House — Visits of Savages to the City — Indian 
King Tavern — Christ Cliurch — Odd Costumes — Quakers and Gallants — Old Gen- 
tlemen and Servants — Penn's House — His Second Visit to Pennsylvania — 
William Trent — The Founding of Trenton in 1719 — The Blue Anchor Tavern — 
Philadelphia Equipage in 1735 — Pack Horses — Introduction of Wagons — Johan- 
nes Starts for Germantown — The Ride Through the Woods — The Aspect of the 
Settlement. 



CHAPTER VI. 

Letters From The Old Country — Bendorf Comes Under The Dominion 
Of The Murdering Margrave of Anspach. 66-73. 
Job. Georg Hager, the Village Prscceptor Writes in 1745, Giving all the 



Contents. 



IK 



Bendorf Gossip- - A Great Fire Burns all the Houses Between the Stein-Gate and 
the Bach-Gate — Who Have Died, Who Have Married, Who Grown Rich and 
Poor — Bendorf Transferred to Anspach — The Many Separate Kingdoms of Ger- 
many — Frederick and Maria Theresa — Despotic German Princes —Their Taxes 
and Oppressions — The Idiosyncracies and Wickednesses of Bendorfs New 
Ruler — German Lawyers — A Letter from Cousin Joh. Anton Kirberger in 1749 
— How the Second Silesian War Distressed the Inhabitants of Bendorf — The 
Banks of the Rhine a Highway for Troops Marching between Holland and 
Austra — Billets and Forages Impoverish the People — More German History. 



CHAPTER VII. 

Johannes Moelich Appears in New Jersey in 1747 — His Brother God- 
frey — Echoes from the Ancient Walls of Zion Lutheran Church 
AT New Germantown In Hunterdon County. 74-96. 
Johannes and Godfrey Moelich in Sussex County, N. J. — In 1750 Johannes Is 
Living on 400 Acres in Readington Tp., Hunterdon County — He and His Son- 
in-law, Jacob Kline, there Establish a Tannery — Our Ancestor Is a Warden and 
Trustee of Zion Lutheran Church — Ralph Smith Conveys the Church Property 
to Johannes Moelich and His Co-Trustees in 1749 — Balthazar Pickel^David, 
Jonas and Tunis Melick — The Religious Fervor of Early German Emigrants — 
" Father Muhlenberg" Comes from Germany to Take Charge of the American 
Churches — ^His Saintly Character and Life Labors — An Old Time Missionary 
Who Could Fight the Devil But Was in Terror of Women — The First Perma- 
nent Pastor of the Church Is Joh. Albert Weygand — A Pastoral Message from 
the Last Century — Reverend John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, Afterwards the 
Revolutionary General — Interesting Information Regarding Zion's Successive 
Pastors — The Worthies of the Congregation — A Letter from Father Muhlenberg 
to Johannes' Son Aaron and His Co-Trustees — William Graft's Long and Use- 
ful Pastorate — A Methodist Missionary Makes a Schism in Zion — Henry Miller 
and His Devout Wife — How Johannes Signs His Name to Church Documents — 
St. Paul's Church in Pluckamin, Somerset County — George III. Grants a 
Royal Charter to Zion and St. Paul's — Aaron Moelich, One of the Petitioners — 
The Varied Spelling of the Family Name — In 1751 Johannes Decides Where to 
Plant the Permanent Homestead — A Survey of His P'amily in That Year. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Purchase of the "Old Farm" in 1751 — The Title and Early New 
Jersey History. 97-111. 
Johannes Buys 367 Acres of Land in Bedminster, Somerset Co. — Bedminster 
Indians — The Algonquins and Naraticongs — Present Traces of the Red Men — 
First and Last Indian Purchases — Fair Dealings with the Natives by New Jer- 
sey People — Early New Jersey History — Charles II.'s Grant to the Duke of 
York — He Presents New Jersey to Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley 
— Origin of the Name — Governor Philip Carteret at Elizabethtown — Pepys' 
Testimony As to the Virtue of Lady Elizabeth for Whom the Town Was 
Named — The Claim of the Elizabethtown Associates Under the Nicolls Grant 
— Concessions and Agreements Published in New England Increase the Popula- 



"x The Story of an Old Farm. 

tion — Settlement of Pisciitaway, Woodbridge and Newark — The Province 
Divided into East and West Jersey — Tiie Sale of West Jersey. 



CHAPTER IX. 

The Twenty-four Proprietors of East New Jersey — George Wil- 

LOCKS AND THE PeAPACK PaTENT. 112-128. 

Carteret Dies, and His Executors Sell East New Jersey — The Twenty-four 
Proprietors — Their Manner of Alienating the Whole or a Portion of Individual 
Interests — Perth Amboy, the Capital — The Origin of the Name — Population 
Under the Proprietors — Settlement of Monmouth County — Interesting Inform- 
ation Regarding the Morris and Stout Families — Ancient Dutch Settlers of 
Bergen — Governors Under the Proprietors — Surrender of the Government to 
the Crown — John Heywood, Robert Burnett and James Willocks — In 1683 
Burnett Conveys One-eighth of Ilis Right to James Willocks — Doctor George 
Willocks Inherits from His Brother James — He Emigrates to East Jersey — His 
Posses-sions and Important Offices — Willocks's Ferries to Perth Amboy — Saint 
Peter's Church at Amboy and Its Benefactors — Thomas Gordon Settles near 
Plaintield — The Proprietors Convey to George Willocks and John Johnstone 
the Peapack Patent — Andrew Hamilton and John Johnstone — Scotch Emigra- 
tion to East New Jersey. 



CHAPTER X. 

The Story of the Title Completed — Early .Somerset Land Grants 

129-144. 
The Peapack Patent Includes Nearly all of Bedminster Township — Dis- 
tinguished People As.sociated with Somerset Freeholds — Interesting Facts 
Concerning Gouverneur Morris and the Duchess of Gordon — The First Real 
Estate Purchase in Bedminster — Daniel Axtell, a Son of the English Regicide 
Buys a Large Slice of the Peapack Patent — Some Corrections as to Generally 
Accepted Beliefs in the History of Somerset Land Titles— The Value of Bed- 
minstef Acres in 1726 — William Axtell, Patriot and Royalist— George Willocks' 
Death — His Will and its Benefactions — It Directs Partition and Sale of Peapack 
Patent — No Record of Such Proceedings Can be Found— Disagreements Between 
the Proprietors and the Willocks Heirs — John Johnstone's Will — Authorizes a 
Compromise as to Peapack Patent — George Leslie, in 1744, Receives a Grant of 
2,000 Acres Out of the Patent — Its Area Includes the Present Site of Bedminster 
and the Old Farm — the Deed from George Leslie to Johannes Moelich — Thomas 
Bartow, Secretary of the Province — Judge Samuel Nevill and His Laws — The 
" New American Magazine" — James Parker, New Jersey's First Printer— The 
Bonds Johannes Gave in Buying the Farm — His Signature and Handwriting — 
The Pleasures of a Manuscript Lover. 



CHAPTER XI. 

The Building of the "Old Stone House "—Redemptioners — Whxte 
Slavery in the Colonies, 145-155. 
Johannes Occupies the Bedminster Land — A Temporary I>og House is 



Contents. 



XI 



Erected — Scenes at its Building — The Raising Dinner — The Old Stone House is 
Built in 1752 — Preparing for the Work — Caspar Berger, a Redemptioner Stone 
Mason, Lays its Walls — His Advent in the Colony and Sale — He Obtains His 
Freedom by Building Stone Houses — All About Redemptioners — Indented Ser- 
vants and Freewillers — Fraud Practised on them in the Old Countries — Inhu- 
manities of Ship Captains — Colonial Laws as to Redemptioners^ — How this Class 
of Emigrants Thrived in the Province — The Walls of the "Stone House" go up 
Apace — Mariah Katrina Carries Mortar on Her Head — The Good Wife Objects 
to so Many Windows — The Completion of House and its Appearance — The 
Hanging of the Crane — The First Supper in the Living Room — A Home at Last 
on this Peaceful Bedminster Hillside. 



CHAPTER Xri. 

Johannes Goes to the Post Office — Bedminster and the Adjacent 
Townships in 1752, 156-168. 
Perth Amboy the Nearest Post Office — But two Post Offices in the Colony — 
Johannes Starts in the Capital of the Province — Bedminster Still a Wilderness — 
The Settlement of Morristown and Mendham — Lamington Church and Jane 
McCrea — Basking Ridge and its Flourishing Presbyterian Community — Lord 
Stirling's Residence — .Jacobus Van der Veer's Log House — Establishing Van 
der Veer's Mills — Ephraim McDowell's Homestead — .Johannes Dismounts at 
Eoff's Tavern at Pluckamin — Christian Eofl as Innkeeper — The Origin of the 
Name of Pluckamin — Aspect of the Village and its P'irst Storekeeper John 
Boylan — Early Families of the Neighborhood — Colonel McDaniel's Saw Mill — 
•Somerville Not Yet in Existence — The First Court-Houses of Somerset County 
— William McDonald's Grist Mill — Johannes Smokes his Pipe as He Follows 
the Trail Over Pluckamin Hills — Wild Beasts and Bounties for Their Extirpa- 
tion — Our Traveller Descends to the "Great Raritan Road" and Reaches 
Bound Brook. 



CHAPTER Xni. 

Bound Brook in the Olden Time— The Raritan Valley in 1752, 

169-181. 
Somerset's Oldest Settlement — Indian Corn Grounds — How Bound Brook 
Derived its Name — The First Land Purchase in the County — Thomas Codring- 
ton's Homestead, Racawackhana — The Houses of George Cussart and Samuel 
Thompson — Lord Neil Campbell and his Plantation — The Presbyterian Church 
of Bound Brook is Founded in 1700— Michael Field's Bequests to the Congrega- 
tion — Colonial Lads and the Pedagogues — William Harris' Tavern — Van Nor- 
den's Folly — Citizens of Bound Brook at the Time of Johannes' Visit — Preva - 
lence of Lotteries — Johannes Rides Down the Raritan Valley — Country More 
Thickly Settled — English and Dutch Residents — Raritan Landing and its 
Industries — Mills in Franklin Township — Cornelius Lowe, Jr's., Stone Mansion 
— Johannes Reaches New Brunswick. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

From an Indian Path to The King's Highway — New Brunswick and 
Historic Piscatawav. 182-199. 



xii The Story of an Old Farm. 

The Oldest Highway in New Jersey — The Lenni-I.enape Path From tlie 
Hudson to the Dehiware — An Indian Thonmglifare From Minisink to the Sea 
—The Path up the Raritan— The Indian Patli Becomes tiie Dutcli Trail— The 
English Make it Their Road Across the Jerseys — Tlie CJrowth of Settlements 
Along the Path — Inians Ferry Established — The Founding of New Hrunswick 
— Its First Church in 1717 — The Aspect of the King's Highway in 1748 — New 
Bnmswick's First Charter — Its Early Citizens — The Appearance of the City at 
the Time of Johannes' Visit— Our Traveller Continues His Journey — Historic 
Piscataway — Its Ancient Importance and Present Torpor — Interesting Frag- 
ments of Antiquity From Its Town Records— The Baptists Build a"Meetinge- 
House" in 1685 — P^dmimd Dunham, in 1707, Forms the First Seventh-Day Bap- 
tist Church in New Jersey — St. James J4)iscopal Church is Established in 1704 
— Early Missionary Work in New Jersey — A Graveyard Two Centuries Old — 
Johannes Rides Along the King's Highway Through Bonhamtown. 



CHAPTER XV. 

The Ancient Capita!, of The Province— Perth Amboy In 1752. 200-214. 

Perth Amboy in the Olden-Time — A Chartered City in 1718 — Governors 
under the Crown — The Pomp of the Advent of Royal Governors — The Early 
Beauty of Amboy — Love Grove — Old English Fairs — George Willocks's Long 
Ferry — The Town Green and the Royal Cross of St. George — The Town Hall, 
and the Scenes it Has Witnessed^Thomas Bartow, his House and Garden — The 
Homes of Doctor John Johnstone, and His Son Andrew — John Watson, The 
First American Painter — His House and Collection of Paintings — The Dwelling 
in which John Nevill Wrote the Laws of the Province — The Parker Homestead, 
Built in 1720 — George Willocks and the Old Parsonage — The Eflectiveness of 
Colonial Roofs — The City's Churches in 1752 — Gilbert Tennent and His Severe 
Text — The Religious Atmosphere of the Last Century. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

SociaIj Aspect of Perth Amboy in 1752 — The Gentry — Slavery' — 
Travelling. 215-232. 
The Picturesqueness of Colonial Times — Local Color of Civilization at New 
Jersey's Capital — Indians, Soldiers, Hunters and Redemptioners — The Sturdy 
German Yeomanry — Society Distinctions — The Magnificence of the Gentry — 
We Are Introduced to a King's Councillor — His Vain Hopes for Amboy's Com- 
mercial (irreatness — The Ladies of the Last Century — Hallam's Theatre Company 
at the Town Hall — Sunday Morning at St. Peter's Church — Pomp and Parade 
at the Capital — The Mayor's Mace Bearer — Judicial Wigs and Robes of Office — 
The Flouxish and Ceremony upon Opening Court — The Stately Minuet, and 
Royal Governor's Balls — The Many Negroes To Be Seen at Amboy — A Short 
History of Slavery in New Jersey — The British Government Fosters the Slave 
Trade — Extent of the Traffic in the Colonies — Cruel Punishments in N. J. — 
Burning, Maiming and Hanging Negroes — Somerset County Farmers and Their 
Slaves — Abolition of Slavery in New Jersey— Johannes' Choice of a Tavern — 
Travel Between New York and Philadelphia — The Miseries of the Journey — 
Clumsy Sloops, Springless Wagons, and Bad Roads. 



Contents. xiii 

CHAPTER XVII. 

Clearing the Bedminster Land — Life on the " Old Farm " From 
1752 TO 1763. 233-246. 
German Farmers in New Jersey — Johannes Attacks his Timbered Hillsides — 
Manner of Clearing Land — Primitive Agriculture — Richness of the Soil — The 
Land Exhausted Ultimately for Want of Nourishment — Lime First Used as a 
Fertilizer — Natural Meadows the Only Grass Land — Introduction of Clover 
Seed into Somerset — Homemade Ploughs and Other Implements — Wheat, Rye, 
and Buckwheat are Cut with a Sickle — Establishing the Tannery — Horticulture 
in the Olden Time — Living, in the " Old Stone House " — What Colonial Farm- 
ers Had to Eat — Some Extraordinary Dishes — The Beverages of That Time — 
The Industries of Farm Families — Old-Fashioned Frolics and Amusements — A 
Visit to the Bedrooms and Garret— Picturesque Garb and Curious Fabrics — 
Mariah Katrina as a House- Wife — A Vipw of the Farm Kitchen — Flax and its 
Uses — Delicate Girls at a Discount — The Tribulations of Washing Day — Aaron 
Malick Marries Charlotte Miller — Changes in the Family — Another Letter 
from the Old Country. 



CHAPTER XVni. 

The Death of Johannes and Mariah in 1763— Changes in the Town- 
ship — The Dutch Congregations of the Raritan Valley — The 
Building of Bedminster Church. 247-265. 

Johannes in his Old Age — He and His Wife Die in 1763 — Aaron Succeeds 
Him in the " Stone House " — Changes in Bedminster — Settlement on the Axtell 
Tract — Jacobus Van Doren and Captain Joseph Nevius — The Dutch Reformed 
Churches in Somerset — The Log Church at North Branch — Raritan Church at 
Van Veghten's Bridge — Three Mile Run, Six Mile Run, and New Brunswick 
Churches — The Reverend Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen as Pastor of the 
United Congregations — His Son John Succeeds Him in 1750 — Dinah Van Bergh 
Marries Dominie Frelinghuysen — The Young Divinity Student, Jacob R. Har- 
denbergh— He succeeds His Pastor, and Marries His Widow — Disparity of their 
Ages — The Religious Character and Attainments of the Juffrouw Hardenbergh — 
Reformed Dutch Congregation of Bedminster Organized in 1758 — The Building 
of the New Church — Donations of Jacobus Van der Veer, and Guisbert Sut- 
phen — Description of the Edifice — The First Service. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

More Changes in Bedminster— The Mills on Peapack Brook — Boyish 
Reminiscences — Marriages and Deaths. 266-279. 
Aaron Improves the Farm, and Enlarges the Tannery — A Saw and Grist 
Mill Established on Peapack Brook in 1751— William Allen, the First Miller— 
His Sons Sell the Mill to Stephen Hunt in 1767— The Building of the '• Folley" 
— A Famous Rendezvous for Bedminster Boys — Penetrating the Hogback — A 
Picture of the Old Grist Mill with Its Pond and Rock-paved Stream— Youthful 
Remembrances— Fishing and Swimming in the "Jinny-Hole"— Miss Jane Bailey, 
Bedminster's Meg Merriles— Rural Sights and Sounds— The Loss of Water in 
Bedminster Streams — Aaron's Family Increases— lattle Elizabeth Is Killed in 



xiv The Story of an Old Farm. 

the Bark Mill — Philip and Peter Moelich Marry Sisters — Borrowing Money for 
Bedminster Church — The Ancient Bond of Jacobus Van der Veer, Marcus King 
and Aaron Malick — John Van der Veer Has Five Different Ways of Spelling^ 
His Surname — Mariah Moslich Marries Simon Ludewig Himroth, and Removes 
to Pennsylvania — More News from Bendorf — Another Interesting Letter from 
the Herr Prajceptor. 



CHAPTER XX. 

The Muttering That Preceded the Storm of the Revolution — 
Stamp Acts, Revenue Bills and Other Unjust Imposts Weaken 
the Loyalty of the New Jersey People — Arming for the Fray. 
280-292. 
The Approach of the Heroic Period of New Jersey's History — The Stamp Act 
and Its Repeal — New Jersey's Attitude bf Hostility to Great Britain — The First 
Revolutionary Newspaper Is Printed at Burlington — The Boston Post Bill and 
Tea Duties — ^The British Government Applies the Torch of Coercion — Organiz- 
ing for Defence — The Province Sends Deputies to the Continental Congress in 
September, 1774 — Formation of Committees of Correspondence — The Meetings 
of the Provincial Congress — An Historic Journey — Minutes of the First Meet- 
ings of the Bedminster Committee of Observation and Inspection — Among the 
Members are Aaron Malick, Cornelius Lane, John Wortman — An Express- 
Rider Flies Through New Jersey Announcing the Battle of Lexington — Hud- 
rick Fisher as President of the Second Provincial Congress — Three Other of 
Its Officers are from Somerset County — John Wortman and Guisbert Sutphen 
of the Bedminster Committee Are Sent to the Congress at Trenton on May 25, 
1775 — Bedminster Proceeds to Arm for Defence — A New Brunswick Man 
Employed to Drill the Men — Stephen Hunt Is Sent to New York to Buy Arms 
— The Difficulty of Obtaining Munitions of War — Leaden Window and Clock 
Weights and Pewter Dishes Are Run into Bullets — Treating the Men When 
Training — The Third Session of Provincial Congress Convenes on the Fifth of 
August, 1775 — A Committee of Safety Is Appointed — Among the Members Are 
Five from Somerset. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

The Declaration of Independence and the Overthrow of the 
Provincial Government — The Arrest of the Royal Governor, 
William Franklin. 293-303. 
The Third Session of New Jersey's Provincial Congress — The Agitations and 
Excitements that Ruled the Hour— Complaints of the People — Strengthening 
the Militia — Meeting, of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia — 
Declaration of Independence Submitted by Jefferson — The Appeal for the Docu- 
ment Made by John Witherspoon, of Somerset, Insures its Acceptance by the 
Members — The Most Important of all of New Jersey's Provincial Congresses 
Meets on June 10, 1776 — On July 18 it Assumes the Title of the Convention of 
the State of New Jersey — All the Ckjlonial Governors Adhere to the Crown 
Except Jonathan Trumbull of Conn. — Governor William Franklin is Arrested 
at Perth Amboy — His Character, Origin and History — William Livingston, the 
State's First Governor — He Holds the Position Owing to Repeated Re-elections 



Contents. 



XV 



until 1792 — A Tribute to His Services and Ability — William Patterson One of 
New Jersey's Great Men— His Residence on the Raritan — The Beginning of 
Things for the United States of America — The Condition, Area and Population of 
the Country in 1776. 

CHAPTER XXII. 

The Turbulent Sea of the Revolution — The Soldiers of Somerset 
— William Alexander, Lord Stirling ; Captain Andrew Malick ; 
AND Private John Malick. 304-318. 
Notwithstanding the War the Industries at the Old Farm Continue — Peter 
Malick Inherits from his Father Land Fronting on the Lamington Road 
— He Builds a House and Settles Where is now the Village of Bedminster — 
Aaron Retains the Tannery, Homestead and the Rest of the Farm — His Brother 
Andrew Settles in Sussex County — In 1770 he Aids in Founding St. James 
Lutheran Church Near Phillipsburg — Andrew is Commissioned as Captain in the 
First Battalion, Sussex Militia, and Serves During the W^ar — Aaron's Son, John, 
Enlists in Jacob Ten Eyck's Company of the First Battalion — Somerset 
Militia — Lord Stirling is its First Colonel — His Home in Bernard Township 
and His Military Record — The Noble Services of New Jersey Militiamen — John 
Malick as a Minute Man — The March of Colonel Nathan Heard on Long Island 
— The Tories of Kings and Queens Counties — a Special Regiment of Hunterdon 
and Somerset Militia is Organized to Re-inforce Washington's Army — It marches 
to New York Under Colonel Stephen Hunt with John Malick in its Ranks — 
The Battle of Long Island — The Death of Col. Philip Johnston — The Capture of 
John Malick by the Enemy — He is Thrown into a New York Sugar House — 
The Inhumanities of his Jailor, Provost-Marshall Cunningham — The Brutality 
of the Provost in Conducting the Execution of Nathan Hale — John Malick is 
Exchanged and Re-enlists in the Continental Line — Washington's Army Enters 
New Jersey. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

The British In New Jersey — Washington's Retreat To The Delaware — 
General Lee In Somerset County. 319-334. 
Cornwallis Enters New Jersey — The Garrison at Fort Lee Joins tlie Main 
Body at Hackensack — Retreat and Pursuit — Tories and Whigs Alike Plundered 
by the Enemy — Washington Driven from New Brunswick — His Army Melts 
Away with Each Mile of the March — What Is Left of the Army Cross the 
Delaware on the Eighth of December — The British go into Winter Quarters at 
Bordentown, Trenton, New Brunswick, and Other Towns — The Rapine, Violence 
and Cruelty of the English Forces — Individual Instances of Sufferings in Somer- 
set and Middlesex Counties — The Ayres, Dunns and Dunhams in the Revolu- 
tion — The Ferocity Exhibited by Tories— Cavalry Raids on Pluckamin — 
Amnesty and Protection Ofi'ered by the Enemy — Many Become Disaffected — 
Aaron, Andrew, and Philip Melick Do not Waver in Their Colonial Sympathies 
— Peter Melick Accepts a Protection Paper from the British — His Disaffection 
Fostered by Frequent Visits to Perth Amboy — The Royal Sentiment Openly 
Displayed at That Provincial Capital— The Attitude of the Church of England 
During the Revolution— Methodists Considered Enemies to the Public Weal— 



xvi The Stoky of an Old Fakm. 

Quakers as non-Combatants — General Charles Lee's Army Reaches Bedminster 
on December 12— The Appearance His Troops Presented — Hunting-Shirts for 
Uniforms and Fowling Pieces for Guns — The Jersey Blues are Uniformed by 
Patriotic Women. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

The Capture of General Charles Lee — His Army Encamps on Peter 
Melick's Land in Bedminster Township — The Battle of Trenton. 
335-351. 
General Lee's Army on the Night of December 12, 1776, Encamps on Peter 
Melick's Farm — Because of His Disaffection tlie Troops Damage His Property — 
Peter's Daughter, Catherine, Lives until 1863 — Her Written Statement as to 
what Transpired on that Night — The "Old Stone House" Entertains a Number 
of Mounted Officers — Fresh Details as to the Capture of Lee at Basking Ridge 
— The Generally Accepted Belief that His Array Lay at Vealtown an Error — 
Lee's Cliaracter and Military Achievements — The Ridiculous Appearance Pre- 
sented by Colonel Sheldon's Connecticut Light Horse— All about the Sixteenth 
British Light Dragoons, which made the Capture — Aaron Malick is Suspected of 
Having Notified the Enemy of Lee's Whereabouts— He is Forced to go to New 
Germantown to Prove His Innocence — Sullivan Marches to Pennsylvania by Way 
of Jjamington and Clinton — The Effect on tlie Country of Lee's Capture — -The 
Darkest Days of the Revolution are those of December, 1776 — Washington 
Undaunted — By the Tenth of December His Array is Reduced to Seventeen 
Hundred Men — In Less than Two Weeks He Increases His Force to 6,000 — He 
Crosses the Delaware and Captures the Hessians at Trenton^The Effect of the 
Victory Upon the Country. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

The Hessians in New Jersey — Just a Little in Their Favor — A Cor- 
rection OF Some False Traditions That Have Been Fostered by 
Prejudiced Historians. 352-370. 
How the News of the Battle of Trenton Was Received at the "Old Stone 
House" — Some of the Hessian Prisioners Have Probably Been Fellow Towns- 
men of Aaron Malick at Bendorf — Sympathy for the Germans — Prince Charles 
Alexander of Anspach, Bendorf 's Ruler, Furnishes George III. with Two Regi- 
ments — Detailed Accounts of the British Army's German Auxiliaries — Repug- 
nance of tlie Hessians to Come to Araerica-IIow Germany's Despotic Princes 
Justified the Mercenary Traffic — Schiller's Protest Against His Countrymen's 
Lives and Services Being Bartered for Gold — The Hatred of the Americans for 
the Mercenaries — The Terror They Inspired Dissipated by Better Acquaintance 
— Many of the Barbarities of the British Unjustly Charged to the Hessians — 
Count Donop's Troops Treat the People of Mount Holly with Great Civility — 
Uniforms and Equipments of Hessians — General De Heister's Treatment of 
Lord Stirling— Tlie Courtesy and Good Breeding of Hessian Officers— Abundant 
Testimony That the Memory of the German Troops Has Been Held in Unde- 
served Obloquy — Many Desert and Settle in America — Some of Their Descend- 
ants Rank Among the Leading Men of the Country — How Christopher Ludwick 
Entertained Eight Hessians Captured at Germantown — Ludwick's Wise Policy 



Contents. xvii 

Eesulted in Many Desertions — President George "Washington's Coachman an 
Ex-Hessian Soldier. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

Washington's March From Trenton To Morristown — The Battles Op 
AssuNPiNK And Princeton — The American Army Encamped At 
Plvckamin — Death And Bttrial of Captain William Leslie. 371- , 
389. 
Cornwallis Marches his Army to the Delaware — The Americans Hold the 
British in Check on the Banks of Assunpink Creek — Washington's Army Steals 
Away under Cover of the Night of January 2 — Some Description of the Com- 
mands Forming this Little Army — The Battle of Princeton — Why so Many 
Commisssioned Officers Were Killed — Captain William Leslie of the Seventeenth 
British Regiment Fatally Wounded — John Witherspoon, the President of 
Princeton College and the Earl of Leven — Surgeon Benjamin Rush takes Charge 
of the Wounded Leslie — His Previous Acquaintance with That Officer's Family 
— The Exhausted Condition of the American Army Prevents an Attack on 
Howe's Base of Supplies at New Brunswick — Washington Marches Up the Val- 
ley of the Millstone Seeking the Protection of the Hill Country — The Encamp- 
ment at Millstone on the Night of January 3 — The Army Reaches Pluckamin on 
the Afternoon of Saturday the 4 — Leslie Dies on Entering the Village — Inci- 
dents of the Encampment — One Thousand Laggards Rejoin the Army— The 
Troops Spent Sunday, at Pluckamin — The Country-People Flock to the Village 
— 230 Prisoners in the Lutheran Church — Aaron Malick Visits the Camp — 
Leslie Is buried With the Honors of War — Captain Stryker's Troop of Light- 
horse Captures Cornwallis' Baggage Wagons — The Army Breaks Camp on the 
Morning of the 6th, and Reaches Morristown that Evening — Formation of the 
Column and Line of March. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

Washington's Army at Morristown in the Winter and Spring of 
1777— The Old Farm on a Military Thoroughfare. 390-407. 
Bustle and Activity in Bedminster — Continental Officers at the "Old Stone 
House " — Washington in Somerset — Farmers Made Welcome at Morristown 
Camp — The Different Spirit Animating British and American Soldiers — Form- 
ing a New Army — Where Different Generals Quartered at Morristown — Festivi- 
ties in Camp — The Death and Military Funerals of Colonels Hitchcock and Ford 
— General and Mrs. Washington Meet at Pluckamin — What Ladies Were in 
Camp — Mrs. Washington's Expenses in Going to and from Virginia — Successful 
Military Enterprises in January — Washington Orders the Disaffected to Deliver 
up their British Amnesty Papers — Peter Melick's Political Change of Heart — 
Different Cantonments in New Jersey — Somerset Maidens and the Handsome 
Major Burr— The Military Attainments of General Greene— His Division 
Moves to Basking Ridge— He Quarters at Lord Stirling's— The Ladies of the 
Household and their Guests— Governor Livingston's Three Bright Daughters 
at the Stirling Mansion — Revolutionary Society at Basking Ridge— Tiie Second 
Establishment of New Jersey — Colonel Daniel Morgan Arrives from Virginia— 
The Military Record of this Jerseyman. 
B 



xviii The Story of an Old Farm. 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 

The Coxtinestal Army in Somerset County in the Spring and Sum- 
mer OF 1777 — Scenes and Incidents at Bound Brook and Middle- 
brook— British Efforts to March to the Delaware Defeated. 
408-426. 
Fighting at Bound Brook — General Lincoln Narrowly Escapes Capture — Brig- 
adier-General Muhlenberg Reaches Morristown — German Lutherans Give the 
Parson-Soldier a Warm Welcome— He Visits the "Old Stone House " — Dominie 
Muhlenberg in Virginia — Hunting with Washington— He Becomes a Political 
as Well as a Religious Leader — Is Commissioned Colonel of the Eighth Virginia 
Regiment — His Farewell Sermon — A Dramatic Incident — His Military Record 
— The British Display Activity in Their Camps — The New American Army and 
Its Generals — Colonel Clement Biddle and His Wife — The Continental Army 
Takes Possession of the Heights in the Rear of Bound Brook — Camp Middle- 
brook Established — Cider Vinegar as a Remedy for Fever — The Campaign Sud- 
denly Opens — Howe Advances in Force from New Brunswick — His Endeavor to 
Entice Washington from His Stronghold — Abandons the Attempt to Reach 
Philadelphia by Land— Falls Back to New Brunswick and Thence to Amboy — 
Greene, Muhlenberg, Wayne, and Morgan in Pursuit — Washington Advances to 
New Market — Howe by a Rapid Flank Movement Vainly Endeavors to Sur- 
round tlie Continental Army — Lord Stirling and Morgan Fight the Enemy at 
Plainfield and Woodbridge— Howe, Outgeneraled in Every Movement, Evacu- 
ates the State on June 30 — The British Embark on Transports— Anxiety Lest 
Howe Should Combine with Burgoyne — Washington Marches to the Hudson — 
The Fleet Sails out of "the Hook" — The Continental Army Hurries Toward 
the Delaware — Muhlenberg, Commanding Greene's Division, Marches Through 
Bedminster — Sword and Holster versus Prayer-Book and Sermon — After a Long 
Delay the Fleet Enters Chesapeake Bay — The Army Bids Good-bye to New Jer- 
sey for that Year. 



CHAPTER XXIX. 

The State of Religion in New Jersey in the Eighteenth Century 
— The Effect of the Revolution on Public Morals — The Strong 
Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian Congregations of Bedminster 
— Curious Church Customs and Practices. 427-447. 
The Continental Army Marches Down the Delaware to the Collision on the 
Brandywine — The Reader Abandons Historic Figures for the Companionship 
of Simpler Forms of Humanity — Bedminister People Are Not Checked in Their 
Ordinary Pursuits by the War — Rigid Views Held by Our Ancestors As to 
Amusements — The Low Condition of Religion Early in the C«ntury — The 
Preaching of Frelinghuysen, Dickinson, Whitefield, Edwards and Others Ani- 
mates the People to a More. Vital Piety — The Rerolution Has an Unfriendly 
Influence on Religious Affairs — Church Edifices Used for War Purposes — The 
R. D. and Pres. Congregations Hold Strongly Together — The Patriotism of 
Domine Ilardenberg and the Reward for His Arrest — Intellectual and lixluca- 
tional Influences of the Pulpit — Sunday at the Bedminster Dutch Church in the 
Olden Time — Introduction of Singing by Note Strenuously Opposed — Sunday a 
Dreary Day for Children — How Sunday was Observed in Ashbel Green's 
Family — Ministers and Church Members Oppose Sunday Schools — Aaron 



Contents. xix 

Malick's Church Connections — Reverend John Rodgers Supplies Lamington 
Pres. Pulpit ; His Character and War Experiences — Presbyterians During the 
Revolution— The Sacrifices and Sufferings of Its Clergy and Laity — Sunday 
at Lamington Church — Curious Practices and Observances — Betty McCoy's 
Appetite and Piety — The Elders Take a Drink with the Minister Between Ser- 
vices — An Installation Ball. 



CHAPTER XXX. 

Revolutioijary Events of 1777 and 1778— Washington's Akmy Again 
AT Camp Middlebrook in the Winter and Spring of 1779 — Inter- 
esting Incidents of the Encampment. 448-460. 

The Advantages Reaped by the Americans in the Campaigns of 1777 
and 1778 — Burgoyne's Surrender and the French Alliance — The Enemy's 
Retreat Across the Jerseys — The Battle of Monmouth — Curious Scenes at the 
Sandy Hook Embarkation— Condition of the Country at the Close of 1778 — 
Washington, with Eight Brigades of Infantry, the Artillery and Some Separate 
Commands, Winters in New Jersey — The British make a Futile Effort to Recap- 
ture Burgoyne's Cannon — Camps Middlebrook and Pluckamin Established in 
December — Washington Quarters at the Wallace House at Somerville — Mrs. 
Washington Joins her Husband in Camp — Guests at Headquarters — The Daily 
Dinner an Affair of Ceremony — Table Service and Appointments — Interesting 
Facts as to Household Manners and Customs — The Open Winter and Warm 
Spring of 1779 — Parson General Muhlenberg Commands Putnam's Division — 
How Soldier's Log Huts were Constructed — Muhlenberg Gives a Ball and 
Supper on New Year's Night — Where the Different Generals Quartered — Uni- 
versal Testimony as to General Greene's ability — Derrick Van Veghten, the 
aged Patriot — Mrs. Greene's Brilliant Qualities Attract Many Visitors to the 
Van Veghten House — Middlebrook Tavern — Mad Anthony Wayne's Encamp- 
ment on the Weston Road — This Officer's Reputation in Somerset. 



CHAPTER XXXI. 

The Artillery Park at Pluckamin — General and Mrs. Knox at the 
Van der Veer House — The French Alliance Fete — General 
Steuben at Bound Brook. 461-473. 
An Attractive Military Village— The Capacious Academy and Its Uses — The 
Artillery Officers and Men are Uniformed in Black and Red — A Popular Error 
Corrected as to Revolutionary Uniforms — How the Different Regiments Under 
Washington were Dressed — General Knox Quarters with Jacobus Van der Veer 
near Bedmineter Church — His Popularity in the Vicinity — Mrs. Knox Spends 
the Winter with Her Husband — Social Intercourse at the Van der Veer House 
— Two Young Lady Visitors from Boston — Tea Drinkings and Hops at the 
Artillery Park — The Grand Celebration on the Anniversary of the French 
Alliance — Washington, his Staflf and Escort, Reach the Park at Three o'clock — 
Mrs. Washington and the President of Congress Arrive in a Coach and Four — 
Distinguished Guests — The Charms of Lady Kitty Stirling Attract William 
Duer to the Fete — The Banquet in the Academy — Balls in the Olden Time — 
Washington Opens the Dance with Mrs. Knox — Judge Linn's Daughter and 
the General in a Stately Minuet — The Society Reporter in Revolutionary Days 



XX The Story of an Old Farm. 

— The Death of Mrs. Knox's Infant Daughter in July — The Bigotry of the Con- 
fiistory of the D. R. Congregation Prevents the Burial of the Child in the Grave- 
yard — Drills and Inspections at Camp Middlebrook — General Steuben as a 
Disciplinarian — His Distinguished Appearance — He Quarters at the Sftaats House, 
Below Bound Brook— Entertainments at this Old Mansion. 



CHAPTER XXXIl. 

Festivities and Ceremonies at Camp Middlebrook — The French Min- 
ister, M. Gerard, and the Spanish Envoy, Don Juan de Miralles, 
Visit Washington— The Grand Review in Their Honor. 474-492. 
Social Intercourse in the Army — Frequent Reunions at the Difl'erent Head- 
quarters — Mrs. Greene's Guests and Their Amusements — Tea Drinkings and 
Little Dances at the Van Veghten House — The Close Friendships of Cornelia 
Lott and Mrs. Greene — Brilliant Young Men Connected with the Army — Colo- 
nels Tilghman and Hamilton — Captain Colfax and Washington's Life Guard — 
Colonel Scammell's Great Sacrifice — Lady Visitors at Washington's Headquar- 
ters — Light Horse Harry Lee at Phil's Hill — Philip Van Horn and His Five 
Handsome Daughters— The Arrival of M. Gerard and Don Juan de Miralles — 
The Spanish Envoy and His Mission — The Army Parades in their Honor — A 
Gala Occasion for Old Bound Brook — The Grand Stand and the Costumes of its 
Occupants — The Appearance Presented by Washington, His Generals, and Guests 
on the Field — Disposition of the Troops — Evolutions and Field Manoeuvres of the 
Army — Enthusiasm of the Multitude when the Battalions Pay the Marching 
Salute — After the Review Steuben Entertains Washington, the Foreign Guests 
and Sixty Officers — Merriment and Hilarity at the Banquet Under the Trees — ■ 
The Clever Young Men of the Baron's Military Family — Indians in Camp — Five 
Soldiers Sit on their Coffins Under the Gallows — The Jersey Brigade in the 
Indian Campaign — In July the Troops Break Camp and March to the Hudson. 



CHAPTER XXXni. 

The Wedding of William Duer and Lady Kitty Stirling — Prince- 
ton College in the Revolution — The Famous Raid of the 
Queen's Rangers Through the Raritan Valley. 493-510. 
Wedding Festivities at Basking Ridge — Civic and Military Guests — How 
Lord Stirling Lost His New Jersey Property — Princeton College Has Its First 
Commencement Since the Outbreak of the War — Nassau Hall and the Presby- 
terian Church Stripped by the Enemy — The Graduating Class of 1783 — Wash- 
ington and Continental Congress Listen to the Valedictorian, Ashbel Green — 
Echoes from the Walls of " Old Nassau " — The Name Occasioned by the Humil- 
ity of a Royal Governor — The Founding of Presbyterianism in New Jersey — 
Some Early Ecclesiastic History — In 1747 the CoUege.Removed from Elizabeth- 
town to Newark — Reverend Aaron Burr, Its Second President — The Beginning 
of Things at Princeton in 1757 — The Simplicity of the College Curriculum in 
Colonial Times — In October, 1779, the Queen's American Rangers Raid Through 
the Raritan Valley — Major Robert Rogers, the First Commander of This Parti- 
san Corps — Lieut.-Col. John Graves Simcoe Assumes Command in 1777 — This 
Raid Conceded to Have Been a Brilliant Military Enterprise — Its Object and 
the Details of the March — Destruction of Washington's Boats and the Dutch 



Contents. xxi 

Keformed Church at Van Veghten's Bridge — The Court House and Two Dwell- 
ings Burned at Millstone — The Rangers Meet Disaster in an Ambuscade — Sim- 
coe Is Made a Prisoner — The Raiders Charge Some Mounted Militia-men, and 
Kill Capt. Peter V. Voorhees — They Escape to South River, Joining Their Sup- 
porting Body of Infantry — Jonathan Ford Morris' Services to Col. Simcoe — The 
Sequence of This Raid Was the Founding of Somerville. 



CHAPTER XXXIV. 

The Cold Winter of 1780— Washington's Army Again at Morris- 
town — Varied and Interesting Camp Experiences — Fighting at 
Connecticut Farms and Springfield. 511-527. 
The Current of Bedminster Domestic Life — The Army Goes into Winter 
Quarters Between Morristown and Mendham — Family Ari-angements at Head- 
quarters — The Main Encampment on Kimball Hill — Watch Towers, Beacons 
and Alarm Guns — Nearly Five Months of Snow — The Frozen Raritan a High- 
way for Teams — The Great January Storm — Citizens and Militia Fighting Snow 
Drifts — The Army in an Extremity for Food and Clothing — Some Curious 
Examples of Currency Depreciation — Lord Stirling's Unsuccessful Enterprise on 
Staten Island — Elizabethtown Surprised and the Presbyterian Church Burned — 
Social Features of Morristown Camp Life — Elizabeth Schuyler's Arrival Causes 
a Flutter in Military Circles — Colonel Tilghman Describes her Fascinations — 
Her Engagement to Colonel Hamilton — Distinguished Foreign Visitors at 
Morristown — Another Grand Review and Public Ball. Don Juan de Miralles 
Dies at Headquarters — The Ostentation and Display at his Funeral — Dissatisfac- 
tion of the Soldiers at Remaining so Long Unpaid — A War of Plunder on the 
Inhabitants Threatened — Dramatic Scenes at an Execution — Fighting at Con- 
necticut Farms and Springfield — The Youthful but Gray-haired Captain Steele 
Commands Mrs. Washington's Guard — Members of Congress as Volunteers and 
Trencher men — The Jersey Militia Cover Themselves with Glory — Breaking 
Camp in Kimball Hill — Arrival of the French Army — The Treachery of Arnold 
and the Death of Andre. 



CHAPTER XXXV. 

The Mutinies of The Pennsylvania and New Jersey Lines — The 
French Army in Bedminster on the Way To Virginia — The Hang- 
ing of Captain Joshua Huddy and the Case of Captain Asgill. 
528-546. 
The Last of Campaigning in Somerset and Morris Counties — The Penn. 
Troops Mutiny and March for Philadelphia under their Non-Commissioned 
Officers — The Country People Alarmed Lest Depredations be Committed --Gen. 
W^ayne's Admirable Behavior Prevents Excesses — Sir Henry Clinton Sends 
Two Tories, Offering the Rebels his Support, and Rewards for Desertion — Tlie 
Spies Delivered by the Soldiers to American Authorities — Congress meets the 
Insurgents at Princeton and Adjusts Their Difficulties — Two Weeks Later the 
New Jersey Line Mutinies at Pompton — The Revolters Are Subdued, and their 
Ringleaders Punished — Gates' Disasters, and Greene's Successes at the Soutli — 
La Fayette's Rapid March Through New Jersey — The American and French 
Armies Combine in July on The Hudson — How Washington Deluded Sir Henry 
Clinton— The Operations of Cornwallis in Virginia — In August the Allied 



xxii The Story of ax Old Farm. 

Armies Suddenly and Rapidly March Southward —The French Army in Somer- 
set — Itinerary and Halts — The Fine Appearance of The Foreign Troops Fill 
the Country People with Wonder — These Beaux Sabreurs of Lauzun's Legion 
Turn the Heads of American Girls — The Fall of Yorktown — The Provisional 
Treaty of Peace November, 1872 — The Story of Captain Josiah Huddy and his 
Murder by Captain Lippencott — Washington Decides upon Retaliation — 
Capt. Asgill of the British Foot Guards, a Prisoner Paroled on Limits, is sent 
to the Jersey Line at Chatham for Execution — His Approaching fate Enlists the 
Sympathies of Europe and America — By Order of Congress in November, He 
is Unconditionally set at Liberty — Why This Was Done. 



CHAPTER XXXVI. 

Peace — Prostration of the Country After the War — Asierican Loy- 
alists AND Their Experiences — The Inquisition Against William 
Melick, and the Confiscation of his Property. 547-562. 
Cessation of Hostilities April 18, 1783 — Final Treaty of Peace Signed in 
Paris September 3 — The Disbanding of the Army — The Country's Ungrateful 
Treatment of its Soldiers — The Pennsylvania Line Threaten Congress — The 
National Legislature Forced to Retire from Philadelphia to Princeton — Instant 
and Unbounded Prosperity Does not Follow the Close of the War — The Need 
of a Staple and Harmonious Government — The Confederation's Fragile Tie 
Almost Broken — New Jersey's Efforts to Secure Greater Powers for the General 
Government — Doctor John Witherspoon Labors to that End — The Deterioration 
of the Character of Congressmen — The Story of the Conception, Growth, Adop- 
tion, and Ratification of the Constitution of the United States — New Jersey an 
Important Factor in Founding the New Government — The Division of Families 
on Political Lines — Retributions Meted out to Loyalists — Aaron Malick's Letter 
to His Tory Cousins — Godfrey Melick's Son William, Adhering to the Crown, 
had Entered the British Army — In 1784 He and His Brother John Emigrate to 
New Brunswick, Canada — They Become Valued and Honored Citizens of St . 
John, N. B. — Some Account of Loyalists During and After the War — The 
Dastardly Acts of a Few Fasten a Stigma on the Whole Class — Whigs and Tor- 
ies Alike Intolerent of Each Others' Convictions — The Number Disaffected in 
New Jersey — A List of the State's Provincial Officers in the English Service — 
The Inability of the General Government, After the War, to Influence the 
States to Act Leniently Toward Tories — Many Thousands are forced to Fly the 
Country — AVhat England Did for Her Loyal American Subjects — The Confisca- 
tion of William Melick's Estate — His Cousin Captain Andrew Ma,lick Serves as 
a Juror on the Inquisition — Interesting Documents Relating to the Proceedings. 



CHAPTER XXXVII. 

The "Old Stone House" in 1788— The First Bedminster Tavern — John 
Malick, Innkeeper — The Practice of Medicine in the Last Cen- 
tury. 563-575. 
Fishing in Shallower Waters— Family Changes in the "Old Stone House" — 
A Survey of the Household in 178S — Bedminster Tavern Built in 178(i — John 
Malick, the Revolutionary Soldier As Innkeeper — Who Met in His Tap Room 
and on His Porch — The Bill That Doctor William A. McKissack Presented to 
John Malick — A County Practitioner of the Last Century — The Idiosyncracies 



Contents. xxiii 

of John's Physician — A History of Medicine in New Jersey — Ministers As Phy- 
sicians — Old Woman Doctors and Their Herbs — Prejudice and Female Modesty 
Retard the Science of Obstetrics — Medical Literature — John Wesley's Extra- 
ordinary Volume on Physic — Medical Progress in New Jersey Dates from the 
French and England Wars — Mode of Education in the Last Century — Some 
Curious Medical Indentures — Lack of Colleges and Schools — Public Sentiment 
Against Dissection and Autopsies — The Introduction of the Study of Anatomy — 
The Few Drug Stores and Chemist Shops Before the Revolution — Generous 
Doses of Obnoxious Mixtures — The People Will Pay for Drugs but Not for 
Visits — Copious Bleeding Resorted to on All Occations — Small-pox the Scourge 
of the Last Century — ^Inoculation and Vaccination Arrest Its Ravages — An 
Extraordinary Wedding at the " Old Stone House " — Charlotte's Cousin, Mar- 
garet Gibbs, Becomes the Fifth Wife of Daniel Cooper — An Inflexible Judge — 
Sentences His Own Son to Execution — How Benjamin Cooper Escaped the Gal- 
lows. 



CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

Some Old Manuscripts and their Story — The Militia and General 
Trainings — County Merchants of the Olden Time — Sloop and 
Stage Coach Travel at the Close of the Century. 576-592. 
Examining Old Papers Found in the Stone House — One of William Livings- 
ton's Earliest Gubernatorial Signatures — Civic and Military Commissions — The 
New -Jersey Militia after the Revolution — The Magnificence of the Rural 
Soldier — Scenes at General Training at Pluckamin — Drills, Ceremonies, Games 
and Horse Races — Plenty to Eat and Drink, and Sometimes a Fight — The New 
Militia Laws of 1815 — The Muster Rolls of Daniel Melick's Company of Infan- 
try in 1806 — Who composed the 1st Battalion, 2d Regiment, Somerset Brigade- 
Lieut. William Fulkerson Buys the Bedminster Tavern Property of Aaron 
Malick in 1800 — John Malick Removes to Schoharie County, N. Y. — A Wool 
Contract in 1784 and the Value of Sheep — The Number of Notes and Bonds 
Given in the Last Century — The Want of a Circulating Medium — Introduction 
of Financial Institutions — Country Storekeeping in Somerset — John Boylan, 
George I. Bergen and John Hunt — Some Interesting Old Bills — Aaron and 
Daniel Melick's Frequent Visits to New Brunswick — Bills of What they Pur- 
chased There — New Brunswick's Prosperity at the Close of the Century — 
Wagon Traffic Across the State — An Endless Procession of Loaded Teams Enter 
the City — Some of New Brunswick's Merchants — Carrying Trade of Sloops — How 
the Passenger Sloops were Constructed — The Industries of Raritan Landing — 
The Introduction of Steamboats — The Dangers and Delays of Travel in 1794 — 
The Palmy Days of Stage Coaching — Thirty Coaches Reach New Brunswick at 
One Time — The Bustle and Activity their Arrival Creates — Ayres' Tavern at 
Dunham's Corners — The Landlord's Pretty Daughter. 



CHAPTER XXXIX. 

The Old Papers Continue Their Story — The Reverend John Duryea 
OF THE Bedminster R. D. Church— The Tax On Carriages — Somer- 
set's Paupers — Daniel Melick Goes to Georgia— Slaveholding On 
The Old Farm. 593-612. 
The Reverend John Duryea Collects his Salary with Difficulty — He Soundly 

Berates his Congregation — Somerset's Few Carriages in the Last Century — 



xxiv The Story of an Old Farm. 

Aaron Malick Pays a Government Tax for the Use of One — The People's Pro- 
test Against this Impost — How Somerset's Paupers Were Treated — Aaron and 
Daniel as Overseers of the Poor — Some Interesting Bills and Papers Showing 
Their Care — Snuff for the Widow Bidderman, Pork for Joseph Nicholson, and 
a Shirt in which To Bury Thomas Gary — Nicholas Arrosmith Presents a Bill 
to the Overseers — All About This AVorthy Citizen — Dr. Eobert Henry and his 
Care of the Poor — His Eevolutionary Record — Lawyer Thomas P. Johnson 
Argues and liOses a Case for the Bedminster Overseers— In 1792 Daniel Melick 
Goes on a Trading Voyage to Georgia — Cutting Off Negroes* Ears and Branding 
their Foreheads — Raflles and Horse Races — He Boards at the Widow Spencer's 
at Savannah — The Goods He Buys and Sells — The Voyage Home On tlie " Ship 
Jenny " — In 1786 Aaron Malick Buys Yombo, His First Slave— His Wife's 
Quaker Nature Rebels Against Slaveholding — Unprepossessing Yombo, and his 
Idiosyncracies — A Survey of the Occupants of the Old Stone House in 1797 — 
Aaron Bays From General John Taylor a Whole Family of Slaves — Honest 
Black Dick, Nance, and their Many Children — Death of Charlotte Malick — 
Slave Life on the Old Farm — Pleasures and Privileges of the Bondspeople — 
Dick and Nance Give a Christmas Party — They and Their Flock go to "General 
Training," — The Death and Funeral of Aaron Malick— His Will Directs the 
Future Manumission of Some of his Slaves — Scenes at the Vendue of his 
Effects — Dick, Nance, and their Youngest Child are Bought by Daniel Melick — 
The Distribution of the Other Negroes — Daniel at the Head of the House- 
hold. 



CHAPTER XL. 

What the Old Papers Have to Say About the Drinkixg Habits of 
Our Forefathers— The Last Cexury's Tidal Wave of Intemper- 
ance — National Reform — Farewell to the Old Farm. 613-625. 
The Story of the Gi'owth of Intemperance in the American Colonies — Ancient 
and Modern Laws Concerning Drunkenness Compared — Intemperance tlie Grad- 
ual Growth of Many Hundred Years — Its Worse Stage is Reached at tlie Close 
of the Last and the Beginning of the Present Century — Tiie Introduction of 
Rum and Apple-Jack into the American Colonies — Sweet, Rich Brandies are 
Distilled from Peaches, Pears, Plums and Persimmons — Apple-Jack Becomes the 
New Jersey Standard Tipple — The First Still for its Manufacture is Set up in 
Morris County — Some Curious Examples of the Extent of the Drinking Vice — 
Tipsy Guests Dance at Weddings, Tipsy Mourners Reel at Funerals — Even 
Clergymen do not Escape the Contagion — Drinking at Installations and at Con- 
sociation Meetings — Ministers as Distillers — The Cultivation of Lands Neglected 
and Soil Planted with Orchards — Eight Distilleries in One Township Along the 
Raritan — Early Efforts to Stem this Overwhelming Torrent of Human Folly — 
The Lamentations and Warnings of John Wesley, John Adams, and Israel Put- 
nam — Doctor Benjamin Rush Becomes the Pioneer of Temperance Reform — His 
Protest, in 1777 Against the Government Supplying Liquor to the Troops — In 
1785 He Issues His Famous Temperance Tract — The Doctor's Tireless Energy 
in the Cause Enlists Sympathy of Others — Lyman Beecher's Powerful Sermons 
for Reform — The First Temperance Society in 1808— The Progress of the 
Movement Exceedingly Slow — An Unpropitious Time for Instilling Restrictive 
Ideas in the People's Minds — Crude Views as to Moderate Drinking— It is 1826 
Before the Cause is Recognized as a Power for Good — The Rearing of the Grand 
Superstructure of National Reform — Farewell to the Old Farm — What Our 
Searches Have Revealed — A Final Survey of its Generations. 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



EASTERN GABLE OF THE OLD STONE HOUSE Frontispiece 

BEDMINSTER CHURCH facing page C 

EVANGELICAL HEAD-CHUKCH, BENDORP facing page 92 

THE OLD STONE HOUSE facing page 154 

[See ADDENDA, p. 713.] 



" This field is so spacious, that it Tvere easy for a man to lose him- 
self in it: and if I should spend all my pilgrimage in this walk, my time 
would sooner end than my way." 

— Bishop Hall. 



THE STORY OF AN OLD FARM 



OR 



Life in New Jersey in the Eighteenth Century. 



CHAPTER I. 

The Peapack Stage — Sunday Morning at Bedminster Church — 
A Betired Hamlet. 

THE traveller by the old highway — the post or stage road — 
leading from Somerville to Peapack, in Somerset county^ 
New Jersey, will remember the village of the Lesser Cross Roads, 
which faces one when some eight miles on the journey, perched 
on the southerly side of a sloping eminence. 

"One of those little places that have run 
Half up the hill beneath the blazing sun, 
And then sat down to rest, as if to say, 
' I climb no farther upward, come what may ! ' " 

Just here is located the '' Old Farm," whose story, or rather 
the story of whose early settlers and their contemporaries, it is 
purposed to chronicle. Let us visit this little hamlet and learn 
something of its history, and of the generations that have lived, 
toiled and died amid the cheerful hills and smiling valleys of 
the rolling country north of the village ; for it is the gateway of 
Somerset's most pleasing regions — the approach to scenes of 
quiet beauty and pastoral loveliness unsurpassed in this portion 
of New Jersey. 

We will choose one of those generous June days when early 
summer has veiled its youthful bloom in a maze of leaf, mystery 
and shade. That our approach to this secluded village may be 
with an humble spirit, in harmony with the rural calm of its 
homely atmosphere, we will journey down — or rather up — by 
the travel-stained stage-wagon that for so many years has lum- 
1 



2 The Stoky of an Old Farm. 

bered out of Somerville every afternoon about three o'clock. 
Squeezing in on the front seat by the driver's side, our legs and 
feet are soon seemingly inextricably entangled with mail bags, 
bundles, whiffletrees and the horses' tails. Well ! the stage 
is " loaded up," three on a seat — twelve inside — with quite a 
mountain of luggage piled up behind. Rattling down the main 
street, and turning north on the Peapack road, the town, with its 
outlying villas standing amid parterres of flowers and shaded 
gardens, is soon left behind. Pounding over a wooden bridge 
that spans a little stream the fair-ground is passed, and the team 
settles doM'n to its regulation jog of five miles an hour, over 
the pleasant levels of Bridgewater township. On either side lie 
well-tilled fields, rich Avith the promise of bounteous harvests. 
Barn-swallows twitter in a farmyard hard by ; a kingfisher, with 
a loud cry, sails away at our approach, and another little tenant 
of the air salutes us from behind a hedge with a flood of sweet 
harmony. From over the fences come the sound of whetting 
scythes, the rattle of mowing knives, and the talk and laughter 
of the liaymakers ; Avhile the breeze for miles away is fragrant 
with the perfume of freshly tossed clover-cocks. 

Insensibly the passengers grow more sociably inclined as they 
exclaim over the charming weather, the rustic beauty of the 
landscape, and the sweet sounds of nature on every side. Our 
driver proves to be loquacious, and familiar with all the gossip 
of the long road he has travelled twice daily for many years, so 
he soon has his passengers in animated talk as to the news of 
their respective neighborhoods. Stop after stop is made at farm- 
houses and cottages by the roadside ; now to leave a morning 
paper — twelve hours fi-om the New York press — now a bundle 
or package, which latter has to be fished from under the seats, 
calling out nervous giggles from the women, with numerous 
*' oh mys!'' — "that's my foot!" — and like ejaculations. Now 
and then some one is '' taken up,'' or " let down," the last stop 
for that purpose having been to discharge a stout farmer's wife 
from the rear seat of the stage ; the intervening passengers must 
need crouch, half standing, holding down the backs of the seats, 
while she wades to the door, dragging after her a large news- 
paper parcel, a spreading turkey-feather fan, and a huge paper 
bandbox encased in blue checked gingham. This impedimenta 



From Someuville to Peapack. 3 

carries in its wake several hats and belongings of her fellow trav- 
ellers. The stout woman receives a warm welcome from two 
buxom girls and a sunburned farmer, who wait behind a paling 
fence, with a background of well-sweep, rusty clapboards, and 
porch o'erclambered with honeysuckle and June roses. The 
wide-open, brown eyes of the shorter and plumper girl take in 
with lively interest each occupant of the stage. While leaning 
gracefully over the gate, the sunlight burnishing her rich waves 
of chestnut hair, the maiden's glances rest a little longer, per- 
haps, on the younger men of the party. But her glimpse of the 
travelling world is transitory, for soon our Jehu, having collected 
his fare, has returned a fat wallet to his trouser-leg, and climbed 
over the front wheels to his seat. The stage rattles on, and 
reaching a short incline bounces over a " thankee-marm," send- 
ing the trunks on the shackly rack behind springing in air, 
and the rebound almost bumping together the knees and chins of 
those of us on the front seat. 

We are now on the new road — so the driver tells us. There is 
certainly nothing in the highway peculiarly applicable to new- 
ness, but like the New Forest in England, or Harper's New 
Monthly Magazine in New York, having once been new it never 
can grow old. Besides, it must be new — you can see for your- 
self the old road meandering off toward the foot hills on the east, 
taking in on its way an ancient weather-beaten tavern, that once 
did a flourishing business. But this ''cut off" was opened some 
thirty years ago, leaving the old hostelrie stranded in the shal- 
lows of deserted traffic. Should the ghost of its former pro- 
prietor, the genial Bill Allen, ever walk its crumbling porches, he 
could easily discern across the fields the tide of travel setting along 
the new road, which once paid tribute in a silvery stream to his 
now decaying till. 

By and by the horses are tugging and straining up the long 
ascent of a spur of the '' Blue" range of New Jersey hills, which 
the people hereabouts delight in calling ''the mountains." 
Reaching the crest, we pause for a breathing, and enjoy an 
extended view of a charminglandscape, richly diversified with the 
variegated hues of the luxuriant June vegetation. In the fore- 
ground lies the Revolutionary village of Pluckamin; church 
spires rising above the dense foliage of the clustering trees, 



4 The Story of an Old Farm. 

mark the hiding places .of other little villages that dot the undu- 
lating western plain; while, far north, binding the horizon, are 
billows of verdure — the swelling hills and green valleys of Bed- 
minster and Pcapack. On descending the hill and crossing 
Chambers brook, which is the line between Bridgewater and Bed- 
minster townships, one of the oldest houses of the neighborhood is 
passed. It was built in 175G by an Irishman named Laferty, who 
afterwards became unpleasantly notorious as the father of a very 
beautiful and profligate daughter, who brought upon more than 
one prominent family in this part of Somerset much shame and 
grief. Her son, hung in Somerville the early part of this cen- 
tury, is the only white man who has suffered capital punish- 
ment in this county since the Revolution. 

Presently the stage is clattering through the main street of 
Pluckamin, and draws up in front of the tavern* door, offering 
to the village loungers who adorn the empty dry-goods boxes in 
front of the several stories, their daily ten minute dose of mild 
excitement. Here the mails are changed, and we embrace the 
opportunity to stretch our legs on the tavern porch. Some of the 
party, '^athirst with breezy progression," disappear inside, in 
search of what a jocose Californian would call "■ interior decora- 
tions," but in the vernacular of this part of the country is 
known as "a leetle apple." This is historic ground. On the 
open space facing us, where the different roads converge, Wash- 
ington, Knox, Greene and the conquerors at Princeton have 
stood about, and talked over the needs and plans of the Revolu- 
tionary army. Many of the ancient buildings in this vicinity 
are unchanged, save by the picturesque hand of time, since those 
doughty days. But we must be off! — the horses have been wat- 
ered, the driver is on his seat. While telling the story of the 
*'01d Farm," we shall more than once have occasion to visit 
Pluckamin, and repeople its streets with almost forgotten 
worthies, with whom we can gossip at our leisure over those 
stormy days of long ago. 

The next point of interest on the route is the North Branch 
of the Raritan, which the road crosses where it flows through a 
shady glen, near Van der Veer's mills. The banks are fringed 
with forest trees whose interlacing branches form over the 

*Since destroyed by fire. 



Crossing the North Branch. 5 

devious stream a roof of almost impenetrable foliage. At times 
the waters brawl over the shallows, offering to thirsty cattle a 
convenient and picturesque ford ; but now, owing to early sum- 
mer rains, the river is brimming. Rumbling over the bridge 
we hear the musical sound of falling waters, and looking up 
under the overhanging boughs discover the torrent plunging 
headlong over the dam* in an impetuous flood. The cool after- 
noon breeze blowing down the river comes to us laden with deli- 
cious, woodsy, watery odors, which quicken our recollections and 
agitate our youthful remembrances. Again we are boys, with 
cork dobbers, buckshot sinkers and hickory poles, angling in 
the pond above for the slippery catfish, the darting dace, or the 
elusive sucker. Featherbed Lane is what they call the bit of 
road beyond the bridge. Successive years have brought succes- 
sive loads of stone, until the roadway has risen above the low- 
lands on either side, and travel is no longer impeded by the 
annual spring freshets, as of yore. Time was when just here and 
beyond stood a fine forest of over four hundred acres; bat that 
was during the life of that eccentric genius, Doctor Henry Van 
der Veer, who was blessed with the good old English prejudice 
against the felling of timber. But with his death came the 
iconoclastic heir, who soon robbed the estate of its chief pride 
and glory. Let us hope that the Doctor's rest in Bedminster' 
churchyard was undisturbed by the ring of the woodsman's axe, 
and the crash of the fall of the sturdy oaks he loved so well. Let 
us hope, too, for the hastening of the time when Somerset's farm- 
ers may learn the agricultural and climatic value of timber, and 
be as eager to set out new patches of woodland as they are now 
to denude the already tree-impoverished country. 

At the next turn in the road we are suddenly confronted by 
the venerable church of Bedminster, standing with stately dig- 
nity overlooking an attractive little green. No bewildering maze 
of tower, transept, clerestory, gable, or rich ornamentation 
impresses the beholder. It is an oblong wooden structure painted 
white, with green blinds covering its double rows of square cap- 
ped windows, and with an octagonal tower which supports a 
round-topped cupola. It is not, however, without good architect- 
ural proportions, or a general effect which is imposing; in fact, 
*Fire and flood have since destroyed both mill and waterpower. 



6 The Story of an Old Farm. 

it is an excellent example of what Emerson calls the only orig- 
inal type of American architecture, the New England Meeting- 
House. But to appreciate what a religious and social factor is 
Bedminster Church in this well-ordered community, it should be 
visited on the first day of the week — on a pleasant Sunday 
morning, when a quiet spirit broods over field and wood, when 
even busy nature seems at rest and filled with calm repose. But 
the world awakens, when, with gentle swell, over the valleys and 
echoing hills sounds the sweet music of the swinging bell, peal- 
ing from the belfry windows, the old, old invitation, Come to 
prayer! Come to prayer! The}^ come, these country worship- 
pers, from ffirm, from village and from mill; they come on foot, 
in wagons, on horseback; some by the dusty highways, some 
over the peaceful meadows, some through the shady lanes — the 
immense congregation gathers. Many approach the sanctuary 
over the green, stepping from the elastic sward to the broad 
portico which hospitably faces the portals. Others, leaving the 
highway at the rear of the building, enter the churchyard through 
a little wicket, and following a foot path that lies in and out 
among the graves and winds along the side of the edifice they 
reach the porch through a second gate. Others, loitering among 
the grassy mounds, read the crumbling inscrip:ions on the 
ancient headstones; while little groups of twos and threes, in som- 
bre garb, stand with bent head and reverential attitude over 
where sleep their dead, awaiting resurrection. 

Not the least interesting feature of a Sunday morning at this 
old cliurch is the motley array of vehicles standing at the fences 
and trees on both sides of the road for a quarter of a mile or less. 
A strange collection, indeed, embracing every kind of trap in 
use for the past half century. Here, is a sulky, to which the 
spruce young farmer has driven his favorite colt to "meetin;" 
there, a long-bodied, black-covered Jersey wagon, with a rotund 
old lady backing out over the front wheel and whiffletrees, aid- 
ing her descent by clutching at the cruppers of the horses, who 
are passive enough after a week at plough or harrow. More 
modeni equipages are not wanting, and occasionally is to be seen 
the old-time, white-covered, farm wagon, carpeted with straw, 
with splint chairs from the farm-house for seats. 

An old country church like this, which draws its people from 




BEDMINSTER CHURCH. 



Sunday Morning at Bedminster Church. 7 

miles around, means much more than one located near populous 
towns and cities. It is the beating heart, the life-giving cen- 
tre, around which all the neighborhood interests and hopes cir- 
culate. It is also a weekly interchange of news and gossip, and 
the people on Sunday morning lay in a store for the coming six 
days not altogether confined to uses of religious and spiritual 
comfort. As the hour for service approaches the women have 
passed inside, but the men gather about the door or under the 
trees, discussing their horses, the crops and whatever may have 
been of interest during the past week. This Sunday morning 
talk is not limited to the one sex, for, on entering, we would find 
the wives and daughters in animated converse over the backs 
and partitions of the pews. When the sexton has rung the last 
bell, by stoutly pulling two ropes depending from the belfry to 
the vestibule floor, the men come clattering through the doors, 
which face the congregation on either side of the pulpit. The 
elders and deacons, first depositing their hats on the sides of the 
tall pulpit stair, seat themselves to the right and left of the min- 
ister, their faces settling into the dignified composures due their 
official positions. Gradually a hush pervades the congregation, 
preceding the solemn invocation. The blessing over, a stir and 
bustle in the rear gallery proclaim the large choir to be stand- 
ing. The cheery-cheeked girls are shaking out their frocks, the 
stalwart youths are clearing their throats ; now is the ear of every 
child in the assemblage alert to hear the first twang of the tun- 
ing fork, following which comes the long concerted " do-mi-sol- 
c?o," of the choir. They have the pitch, and break away into a 
loud psalm of praise, or song of thanksgiving, the large congre- 
gation taking up the refrain, till the old church rings with that 
most jubilant of all music, hearty congregational singing. 

And so the service continues, with prayer and praise, and 
sermon and doxology, not forgetting the collection, taken up in 
funny little black bags poked down the pews at the end of long 
poles. I must acknowledge it is many years since I have been 
in this time-honored church ; but, doubtless, there have been few 
or no changes since the closing pastorate of Domine Schenck, 
some thirty or so years ago. How well I remember, in those 
days, the pleasure with wiiich a certain small boy, in a round- 
about brass-buttoned jacket and nankeen trousers, looked for- 



8 The Story of an Old Farm. 

ward to a summer Sunday morning at the old church. His seat 
was well up toward the pulpit, and, did the service grow weari- 
some, through the open door could be seen the horses biting at 
the flies, the leaves stirring in the soft south breeze, and the hov- 
ering butterflies floating in the sweet sunshine over the close- 
knit turf of the green. Will ever be forgotten the delightful old 
lady who sat in a great sqifare pew immediately in front of the 
one occupied by that same small boy ; and who, when he, lulled 
by the monotone of the sermon, or the droning of the drowsy 
bees that circled in and out the open door, nodded with sleep, 
would surreptitiously pass behind little bunches of penny-royal, 
or other fragrant herbs, and on rare occasions — ah happy day! — 
a store-bought peppermint lozenge. But enough of boyhood and 
Bedminster church. It is quite time for us to be looking about 
the village. 

All this time our stage-wagon is still rolling on; not very 
rapidly it is true; the horses seem exhausted by a previous 
journey. You must remember they have dragged a heavy load 
•from Peapack — twelve miles — this morning; now, when thus far 
on their return, the slackening trace and more pronounced jog 
proclaim their protest against speed. Presently our goal is in 
plain sight, facing us as we drive along the straight road which 
stretches over a level country, 'twixt meadows, orchards and 
comfortable homesteads. The attractive parsonage, with its sur- 
rounding glebe, is behind us on the left ; beyond, on the right, 
down a tree-embowered lane, a glimpse is obtained of a substan- 
tial farm house and its old-fashioned garden. On we roll, pass- 
ing the forge with its waiting horses, loud-breathing fire, and 
dusky interior, until the stage creaks and strains as it mounts 
the side hill, and comes to a stand-still at the Bedminster tavern, 
which rests on the edge of the first terrace of the incline. Here 
ends our ride; Bedminster and the Lesser Cross Roads, owing 
to a recent fiat of the Post-office Department being one and the 
same. 

First impressions are not always to be relied upon. Perhaps 
you do not like my village? I must confess it has an air rather 
unkempt and forlorn: it can hardly be called a village, — ;]ust a 
wayside hamlet. In the last century, when these four roads met 
here, or rather, the two highways crossed each other, the nat- 



The Lesser Cross-Roads. 9 

ural consequence was that industrial germ of ail new settlements 
— a blacksmith shop. Later came the store and tavern. Little 
houses have since dropped hap-hazard along the roadsides, but 
the village has long been finished, and now seems quite in the 
decadence of age. ' Its most pleasing aspect is along the north 
road, where the rusty old houses with their gable ends fronting 
the highway picturesquely cluster in patches of white and gray 
on the successive terraces that form the ascending hillside. 
Trees and generous shade wei'e evidently not considered 
adjuncts to rural beauty by ''the forefathers of the hamlet;" yet, 
notwithstanding the bareness of the place, it has a quaintness of 
its own, due to the antiquated houses with their old-fashioned 
gardens, which ofi^er a rather pleasing contrast to the newness of 
the buildings in so many of the New Jersey villages contiguous- 
to the railways. 

The small structure on the corner, opposite the tavern, is that 
magazine of wonders, a country store. Is it not a funny little 
shop ? Just like one of the wooden houses that come in the 
boxes of toy villages. Its interior is odd enough to satisfy the 
most diligent searcher after the queer and old. The counters 
are worn smooth by the dorsal extremities of the neighborhood 
Solons, who have gathered here for sixty years of evenings, to settle 
the affairs of the nation and comment on the gossip of the country 
for miles around. Many an ancient joke has here over again won a 
laugh — many a marvelous tale has been listened to with open- 
mouthed wonder by country lads, who have tramped miles for 
the pleasure of an evening in general society. Although it is a 
wee-store, here can be found everything, from a fishhook to a 
hayrake, from a quart of molasses to a grindstone. Dress pat- 
terns and calicoes — fast colors — rest on shelves ; nail kegs and 
sugar-barrels offer seats for waiting customers ; boots, pails and 
trace-chains decorate the ceiling ; while dusty jars tempt the 
school children to barter eggs for sticks of peppermint and win- 
tergreen, or the succulent Jackson-ball. 

Of the roads focusing here, the one from the south we have 
travelled, and with the one towards the north we shall soon 
grow familiar. The west road leads to Lamington, New Ger- 
mantown and the pleasant agricultural lands of Hunterdon ; 
while the one on ihe east stretches away beyond the North 



10 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Branch of the Raritan river, over the historic hills on which rest 
Liberty Corner, Basking Ridge and Bernardsville, villages rich 
in Revolutionary reminiscences. 

Down this east road a little way — you can see it from the cor- 
ner — stands the school-house. Your guide has been soundly 
thrashed more than once in that little building, or in one on the 
same site ; but that was more than a quarter of a century ago, 
■when he, a brown-cheeked, barefooted boy, trudged over these 
hills each morning before half past eight, carrying his dinner in 
a tin hlickie. The school teacher of that day would hardly have 
appreciated Anthony Trollope's suggestion, that those school- 
masters, insisting upon following the doctrines of Solomon, 
should perform the operation under chloroform. Surely the boys 
of that time have not forgotten the Cwss Roads pedagogue, who 
never spared the rod, or rather rods, for he had two. With one, 
a young sapling cut fresh each morning, he could plant a welt on 
the shoulders of a boy six feet away. This was but the admoni- 
tory gad. When serious business was meant the luckless cul- 
prit must mount the back of a larger boy, who, gathering the 
victim's legs under his arms, tightened his trousers over the 
point of attack; then would "the teacher" lay on with a short, 
sharp switch. The office of under boy was no sinecure, for did 
the descending birch miss its shining mark, it must needs fall 
upon the coadjutor's legs, to the great amusement of his com- 
rades, — boys are such unsympathetic wretches ! I wonder do 
the girls still have standing in the corner of the school lot the 
stone plaj'house, filled with broken bits of china ; and the old 
stone fort in the opposite corner, is it still intact, and well sup- 
plied with pebbles to resist assault ? I will go bail the boys 
of the present know, as well as did we old fellows, the short cut 
across lots to the Mine Brook hole, a deep pool guarded by 
gnarled oaks and overhanging sycamores. A plunge in its cool 
depths must at any time be the ultima thide of delight in a 
school boy's summer nooning. 

The day wears on. You will soon think me garrulous if I 
am allowed to continue talking of boyish times at the "Cross 
Roads." The stage has long ago lurched and jolted eastward, 
and is now creeping along the road that stretches over the bot- 
tom lands beyond the i-iver, thus avoiding the hills which we 



Farewell to the Village. 



11 



must proceed to climb. You are forgiven for not falling in love 
with the village — perhaps, it was hardly to be expected — ^^but 
now that we approach the ^'Old Farm," I shall be disappointed, 
indeed, if you fail to appreciate the singular and peculiar beauties 
of its grassy hillsides, interspersed with ancient orchards, its 
broad meadow spaces, its groves of oaks, and streams of sinuous 
course. 



'^^. 




CHAPTER II. 

The Old Farm — Its Upland Acres,, Broad Meadoivs and 
Ancient Stone House. 

He who loves his fellow man, and he who loves nature, must 
be fond of a country road ; it appeals in tones both human and 
divine, for it is the bond connecting the works of the Creator 
with the productions of humanity. This sentiment is peculiarly 
appropriate to highways that traverse distant and retired neigh- 
borhoods, such as we are at present visiting. The road run- 
ning north from Bedminster, up which we now bend our steps, 
is in happy accord with such suggestion, and gives most agree- 
able promises of rural loveliness as it leaves the village and 
wanders over the hills, hedged in by banks from which outcrop 
the shale forming the foundations of this part of the world. The 
reddish brown roadway lies on the sunny rise in pleasing con- 
trast to the flushed, time-stained grays of the gables of the bor- 
dering houses, which peer down over the banks from their set- 
tings of sweet briar, marigolds and snowballs. As we climb the 
hill, I, at least, am filled with the most delightful anticipations. 
In approaching a spot hallowed by memories of early associa- 
tions it is always better to alight from your carriage and pro- 
ceed on foot. You are thus nearer to nature's heart and better 
able, in "pedestrial observation and contemplation, to enjoy the 
pleasures of recollection." We mount for a quarter of a mile or 
less, and soon see, beyond, the rounded tops of a brave bit of 
timber. It is the confines of the "Old Farm." Originally its 
lines extended to and embraced much of the "Cross Roads;" had 
the early owners declined to sell, that settlement would have been 
a one-sided affair: different parcels have been conveyed, none 
within half a century, until the tract now includes about one 



Approaching the Old Farm. 13 

hundred and forty acres. The farm lies to the right, on the east 
side of the highway. Before reaching it we pass a neglected 
^' God's- Acre." It is the simple burial place of slaves and their 
posterity, who once formed an important element of the work-a- 
day world of this township. The headstones, if there ever were 
any, have long since disappeared ; the decrepit fences are cov- 
ered with a rambling growth of weeds and creeping vines, and 
the rains of many years have beaten level the humble mounds of 
the dusky toilers. 

But the hoary trees of the deep green wood beckon us on. 
Here we are — the ''Old Farm" at last. Did you ever see a 
finer patch of woodland? It is primitive forest. Venerable oaks 
have thrown their shade over the slopes, glades, copses and 
leafy recesses of this royal grove, since the days the Indians 
roamed at will over these fair lands. Looking far in the tim- 
bered acres to where the shadows and sunlight alternate, and 
" one leafy circle melts into another," does it not suggest Sher- 
wood Forest I Free from underbrush, with the majestic trees, 
standing at stately distances, one can well imagine seeing, where 
the sunshine darts through yon sylvan bower, Robin Hood and 
his merrie men kneeling on a soft bed of green moss, at the 
base of a sacred oak, while jolly Friar Tuck invokes a blessing 
on some new marauding enterprise. 

Let us push on over the breezy uplands. The road scales a 
small ridge, then lies along a short level, and sinks into a little 
dell, only to mount higher on the farther side. Its trend is now 
eastward, and the flanking banks are surmounted by rusty grey 
rail fences, whose straddling posts rise from a tangle of milk- 
weed, sumac, wild blackberry and alder bushes. Just here a 
long lane leads to a colony of farm buildings — the Abram D. 
Huff homestead — with a background of dark woods. The eye 
ranging south and west overlooks a charming prospect for miles 
away. The ebbing sunshine, flooding down wide streams of light, 
intensifies every shade of color in nature's wonderful mosaic of 
tillage and fallow, of level sweeps of pasture and waving fields 
of grain. On the other side of the road the hillsides of the ''Old 
Farm" fall away abruptly in great, grassy cascades, till they 
blend with the meadows that stretch to a line of waving trees, 
marking where winds a silvery stream hastening to join the Rari- 



14 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

tan. One can hardly phrase the harmonies that dwell in the 
peaceful atmosphere of such a landscape. It possesses what 
some one has said of the Blue Grass region of Kentucky — "the 
quality of gracefulness." The face of the country is buoyant 
and rolls away in billowy undulations, now subsiding into quiet 
valleys, now gently ascending woodland slopes, the deep soil of 
the green fields lying in continuous, lawn-like surfaces, present- 
ing between the eye and the horizon in every direction a pano- 
rama of symmetry and beauty. 

On our left a cross-country road, running north and west, 
leads to the Holland neighborhood and divides the Huff and 
Oppie farms. The latter is a little fifty-acre homestead formerly 
a part of the "Old Farm." From here the main road runs due 
east over a high level, and soon has on both sides the broad 
upland acres of our ancestral plantation. Walking on, we reach 
the edge of a long, steep descent, known for a century past as 
the " Melick hill." Here the road plunges down over a series of 
plateaus, until, nearly two thousand feet away, it disappears 
around a graceful bend, where it crosses the brawling Peapack 
brook, in this direction the boundary of the farm. 

One may journey many miles in many countries without find- 
ing a lovelier outlook than from this hill-top. Perhaps you think 
that the fertile valley below, luxuriant with the freshness of gen- 
tle summer showers, smacks too much of utilitarian beauty? 
True, nature does not here present herself in a grand or majes- 
tic aspect ; precipitous rocks, bold declivities and long ranges of 
serrated peaks are not features of the landscape. But nature in 
its various phases fits all moods, and it has other charms than 
those of the wildly picturesque ; those unveiled in the homely 
and restful scene of these peaceful hillsides have a quiet fasci- 
nation, far more satisfactory than if emanating from gorge, 
chasm, or upheaved rocks. It is the domesticity of the scene 
that charms. As you watch the slanting sun illumine the mead- 
ows with their meandering brooks, the orchards, farmsteads 
and great barns, emblems of plenty ; as you watch the afternoon 
shadows settling in the valley and slowly creeping upward and 
backward on the opposite slope, you are reminded of one of those 
lovely vales in midland England; vales which Henry James 
describes as mellow and bosky, and redolent of human qualities. 



Descending "Melick Hill." 15 

We are told that one born with a soul for the picturesque finds 
in American landscapes naught but harsh lights, without shade, 
without composition, without the subtle mystery of color. Is 
that true ? Standing here overlooking this charming country- 
side, do you discover anything garish, any tones that offend ? 
Color — why here is the very essence of the mystery of color. See 
yonder! that little island of cloud-shadow float over the field of 
bending grain, a field of a most delicious green interspersed with 
suggestions of yellow, the promise of golden harvests soon to 
come. Observe, beyond the river! how in those broad acres of 
young corn the tender green stands out against the rich dark 
loam from which it draws its lusty strength. See, too, the luxu- 
riant verdure of the woodland, topping the undulating rise 
beyond yon sloping pastures. Here are light, shadow, form and 
color, and all that go to make a picture of quiet, restful beauty, 
with an atmosphere of sweet content. Bear with my enthusiasm. 
I love these hills and all that can be seen from their kindly 
sides. 

Come ! we will go down into the valley. The terraces give 
pleasant breaks to the steep incline of the road. As we pro- 
ceed, the faint sound of mill-wheels and brooks comes up from 
below, and the air is fresh and cool with the palpable breath of 
the waters pouring over the dam. Presently, across the fields 
on the left, an antique orchard intervening, are to be seen the 
large barns, hovels and farm buildings, and not far beyond, a 
little lower down, wreaths of blue smoke curl above the long 
brown roof of the old homestead. Just before reaching the foot 
of the hill we come to a grand old maple, whose spreading 
branches have for a century of summers waved a leafy welcome 
to comers to the '^ Old Farm." To you, perhaps, it is but a 
fine tree, but I indeed would be devoid of all sensibility if deaf 
to the music of the leaves stirring amid its venerable branches. 
Their sound excites the most agreeable sensations, awakens 
memories of the many happy, youthful days that have witnessed 
my return to the refreshment of this old maple's shade, and to all 
the pleasure that invariably followed a visit to this cherished 
homestead. Here we leave the highway, and, turning to the 
left up a short incline, are in front of the Mecca of Our hopes — 
the Old Stone House. Facing an antiquated door yard and 



16 The Story of an Old Farm. 

shaded by elms, it rests lovingly against the side of a sunny 
T^ank of turf, springing from the grassy slope as if part of the 
geological strata rather than a superstructure raised by the hand 
of man. They builded well in those old days, and now the walls 
of this sturdy dwelling, humanized and dignified by five genera- 
tions of occupants, are as stanch and apparently as well pre- 
served as when laid in 1752 ; as firm as when Johannes Moelich 
erected here in the then wilds of colonial New Jersey a home 
that should be to him like unto those ancient houses of masonry 
he had always known, bordering the banks of the winding Rhine, 
in far away fatherland. 

There is nothing pretentious about this dwelling ; nothing 
suggestive of the fine mansion ; just a quaint low house, with a 
-comely old-time presence. Almost a cottage in size — it has but 
nine or ten rooms — the whitewashed walls, massive enough for 
a citadel, are pierced in a hap-hazard sort of way with odd little 
windows, from which twinkle queer diminutive panes of glass. 
At the west end it is one and a half stories high, but the slope of 
the hill gives another storey at the eastern gable. Formerly the 
roof was thatched with straw, and among my many treasures 
prized as souvenirs of this old farm are a pair of the original 
thatching needles, made of iron and shaped like a sickle. Build- 
ings, like people, have facial expressions peculiar to themselves. 
This homely house bears on its aged face a gentle and benign 
expression of invitation and welcome, as if reflecting a great 
interior heart, beating with generous hospitality. 

There is an air of comfort and repose about this farm- house 
that renders it distinctive among dwellings. Without the osten- 
tation of a fine villa, or the pertness of an ambitious cottage, it 
has an atmosphere of friendliness and good cheer that fills all 
comers with pleasant anticipations. Crossing a wooden-seated 
porch the open door ushers us into an ample hall. An ancient 
time-piece ticks at the foot of the stair and the cool evening 
breeze draws through the upper half of the rear door, beyond 
which is a view of a pleasant stretch of meadow disappearing 
down a steep bank into a belt of trees bordering a mill pond. 
From the back porch you can see at the foot of the hill on the 
east the buildings of Schomp's grist and saw mills. Together with 
their contiguous dwelling, the dam and the beautifully shaded 



The Old Stone House. 17 

stream below, they present a charming rural picture. Formerly 
the bottom lands on this side of Peapack brook were checkered 
with square vats, for the owners of the " Old Farm " have not 
only been farmers, but for four generations were tanners of 
leather and grinders of bark. But the tan vats have long been 
filled up, the bark mill is a picturesque ruin, and the waters that 
once turned its busy wheel now run to waste in their sluices and 
race-ways. 

But to return to the Old Stone House. You see it is only a 
plain farm-house, after all, with no remarkable staircases or 
ancient tiles to interest the visitor. It is true quaint cupboards 
with curious little panes of glass peer out from the corners of 
some of the rooms, and those extraordinarily complicated locks 
on the doors are of German manufacture, and were put on at the 
building of the house. The incline of the floors is not due to 
the old age of their supports or the weakening of the walls — 
the latter will not weaken till some inhuman one uses their foun- 
dations for a quarry. But when this old house was new, carpets 
were unknown among farmers, and these floors were laid on an 
incline in order that each morning, before being freshly sanded, 
the old sand and dirt could be more readily swept into the hall. 
By far the most interesting room is the farm kitchen, or living- 
room, downstairs. There is an outer kitchen resting against the 
east gable in which is built the great Dutch oven. What batches 
of rye and wheaten loaves have browned in this capacious sala- 
mander. On opening the furnace door the savory fumes of bak- 
ing cake seem in the air ; you almost see the plethoric pans 
drawn from the heated vault, the rich crusts, puffed with the 
pride of their own sweetness, towering till they burst in golden 
Crevices. Picture to yourself in all the years of generous living 
the endless procession of pies, puddings, creature-comforts and 
dainty delicacies that have been discharged from the mouth of 
this broad oven. Both tradition and memory bear witness as to 
there having always been good cooks in the Old Stone House. 

To the east of this outer kitchen is a neglected garden begirt by a 
crazy fence of ancient construction. Clambering hop and other 
straggling vines partially hide the weakness of the aged inclosure, 
while a luxuriant growth of currant and gooseberry bushes, 
intermingled with all sorts of weeds and creepers, give to the 
2 



18 The Story of an Old Farm. 

fence an air of substantiability which it is far from possessing. 
The black loam, enriched with years of rotting leaves, plants 
and vegetables, feeds patches of hereditary lilies and old-time 
flowers, grown from seeds brought from Germany. Several 
ancient plum and twisted quince trees cluster in one corner, their 
trunks grey with the lichen of time, though still thrifty from the 
long drinking of the rich juices of exuberant vegetation. Were 
it later in the season a few choice yellow pumpkins and crooked- 
necked summer squashes would be seen turning their ripening 
backs to the warm sun, swelling with the possibility of future 
pies ; and pale green cucumbers, fattening on the black soil, 
would sprawl among the beds. But now the narrow paths are 
bordered with pinks and sweet-williams ; between them stand 
early beets in sober rows, and young bean vines just reaching 
for their rusty poles, while blossoming potato and tomato plants 
contribute their bit of color, and give a finish to this old- 
fashioned picture. 

The threshold of the farm kitchen, or living-room, even in my 
time was guarded by a double Dutch door, but the demon of 
improvement has replaced it with a more modern entrance. We 
can step directly from the grass and trees of the dooryard to its 
interior, and at once are in a bit of the old world. Coming out 
of the daylight the room seems dark, with mysterious corners 
and outlets, for it is lighted by small windows set deep in the 
thick stone walls. As for the outlets, I know well that the cor- 
ner one farthest from the door leads into the large cool cellar, 
where are firm yellow pats of butter and pans of rich cream, 
where stone crocks stand on the earthen floor filled with moist 
pot-cheeses, nut-cakes and all manner of good things, while cor- 
pulent jars distended with sweets, and rows of pies stuffed with 
lusciousness, adorn wooden shelves hanging from the ceiling. 
How often have big-hearted housewives disappeared within its 
dark recesses only to return laden with good cheer for my 
delectation. Most of the furniture of this room dates back to the 
last century. The hugh press standing against the west wall 
was built in Germany before 1735, and is a curiosity in its way. 
Though the wood is of walnut it is black with age, and its height 
is so great as to preclude the use of its round black ball legs, 
which for years have served as children's playthings in the gar- 



The Old Stone House. ' 19 

ret. This Passive piece of brass-mounted furniture is capped 
by an overhanging cornice that projects some twelve inches, and 
has stood in its present position since the house was built. 

What a wealth of old associations cluster about the dusky- 
corners of this low-ceilinged room. While these oaken beams 
were growing dark with the mellowing hand of time, golden- 
haired children have sat about this ancestral hearthstone, 
building in the glowing embers pictures wrought of their 
budding fancies. These same beams, still unbent by the 
burden of age, though brown with the deposits of years, 
have seen those same children, now old men and women, 
picturing in the ashes of the lighted logs the memories of their 
past lives. And so the generations have come and gone, and so 
they have moved ^' gently down the stream of life until they 
have slept with their fathers;" like trees of the forest, the old 
falling that the young may thrive, sending out offshoots into 
the world until, since the great crane was first hung in the cav- 
ernous fireplace, from the Gulf to the Lakes, from the ocean to 
the Rockies, nearly a thousand descendants of the builder of this 
dear old home have peopled our broad land. 

And who was the German immigrant who felled the forest of 
this Bedrainster valley I Nobody ! And who were his children 
and his children's children, who have wrested from these sunny 
slopes their treasures of grain and abundant grasses, and have 
dotted the pastures below with glossy cattle ? Just nobodies ! At 
least so the world would say. You do not find their names 
emblazoned on the pages of history, nor do they appear high among 
those of the counsellors of the nation. Neither have their vices 
or profligacies distinguished them as subjects for memoirs, plays 
or novels. An honest, simple. God-fearing folk ; with the 
homely virtues of industry, integrity, frugality and hospitality, 
they have tilled the soil, tanned leather, built churches, sup- 
ported schools, occupied modest positions of public honor and 
trust in the community, and fought the battles of their country. 
Quietly have many of them passed their uneventful but well- 
ordered lives, and quietly at life's close have they lain dowTi in 
Pluckamin or Bedminster churchyard, their memories embalmed 
in the respect and affection of their fellows. It is the characters 
and virtues of just such plain people that have constituted the 



20 The Story of an Old Farm. 

bulwarks and strength of the American nation. The annals of 
families and communities are the real basis of all history. We 
are told that the history of a nation is to be read in its politi- 
cal life. An obviously true proposition, but to present to the 
mind the complete progress of a people, it is not only necessary 
to understand the superstructure of politics and civil life, but 
that substratum of society, as well, which cultivates the arts of 
peace and gradually develops the country; that substratum of liv- 
ing men and women of their time, whose acts and the daily rou- 
tine of whose existence form the true foundation of history. 

During the past ten years it has been my pleasure to make a 
study of that little slice of New Jersey embraced within Bed- 
minster township, or rather a study of its people as connected 
directly and indirectly with the settlers and occupants of the 
^' Old Farm." As such investigations and researches continued 
the field they covered gradually widened until it embraced all 
the middle and northern counties, and to some extent included 
the state at large. Over two hundred ancient documents, letters, 
deeds, bonds, bills and manuscripts have been collected. In 
reading between the lines of these papers one finds almost a com- 
plete historical narrative of the "old times" of this section. 
Light is thrown upon the most interesting facts as to the cost and 
manner of living, the fashion in dress, the habits, characteristics, 
personal relations and daily life of the inhabitants of New Jersey 
in the last century. Knowing that throughout this country there 
are many descendants of Johannes Moelich, who have never vis- 
ited the "Old Farm" and have but little knowledge of its history 
associated with their own families, I have thought it a duty, and 
found it a labor of love, to give in a connected form the result of 
my researches. Having drawn on the preceding pages an outline 
picture of these homestead acres, and of the approach from the 
railway, in the coming chapters an endeavor will be made to give 
some idea as to what manner of people were their early settlers, 
from whence they came, and why they came. In like manner I 
shall hope to convey to the reader some impressions of the suc- 
ceeding generations that have called the Old Stone House 
home. With their story will be interwoven much fact and some 
tradition, regarding the experiences of the New Jersey people in 
the eighteenth century and such matters of local county his- 



Somerset's Historical Background. 



21 



tory as it has been my good fortune to gather. The story of the 
"Old Farm" is the easier told because of its setting. Somerset 
landscapes present a succession of beautiful pictures, whose 
charms are greatly enhanced by their historical backgrounds. 
Every corner of the county has a story of its own full of interest^ 
and as we walk abroad pursuing our task, we shall find on all 
sides pregnant facts and well-grounded traditions moving hand 
in hand down the long avenues of the past. 




CHAPTER III. 

JBendorf on the Rhine — Johannes Moelich Emigrates to America 
in 1735 — The Condition of Germany in the Seventeenth and 
Eighteenth Centuries. 

The storied beauty of the winding Rhine is nowhere more 
famed than in the vicinity of the ancient city of Coblentz — the 
*' Confltientes" of Roman days. Here have nature and man com- 
bined in forming a scene of rare and picturesque loveliness. On 
reaching this quaint settlement it is not the old town with its 
massive walls stretching along the banks of the Rhine that first 
impresses one ; nor is it the Moselle, whose waters here swell the 
flood of the greater river. It is the majestic fortress of Erhen- 
breitstein, crowning the almost perpendicular rocks on the far- 
ther shore, four hundred feet above the stream, that dominates 
the scene and dwarfs every object within its frowning presence. 
This vast fortification, the Gibraltar of the Rhine, is inaccessible 
on three sides, and dates back to the Franconian King Dagobert, 
in the seventh century. From its extensive glacies, fosses and 
towers the eye ranges over a charming and varied landscape, 
embracing hillsides terraced with vineyards, bold declivities 
stored with legends, and green valleys filled with the romance of 
the Middle Ages. Immediately below are the palaces, turrets 
and red roofs of the second city of importance on the river. The 
old basilica of St. Castor elevates its hoary towers above an angle 
in the town wall where the rivers join, and beyond the massive 
arches of a bridge of heavy blocks of stone take fourteen huge 
strides across the Moselle. On the south, in plain sight, are the 
stately, grey-stone battlements of the royal chateau of Stolzenfels, 
capping a timbered eminence, while down the river can be seen 
a succession of picturesque villages, whose long Rhine streets 
almost form one continuous settlement. About four miles away 



Bendorf and its Ancient Church. 23 

in this direction the convent island of Niederwerth splits the 
current of the stream. A little beyond and a mile or so back from 
the right bank of the river, in a valley surrounded by apple 
orchards, rests the ancient village of Bendorf. 

With us a place of over four thousand inhabitants would 
feel entitled to be considered a town, but on the continent of 
Europe a settlement requires more than population to attain such 
dignity. Bendorf has the appearance of grey antiquity common 
to most of the old settlements along the Khine. Its narrow 
streets, without sidewalks, are lined with low, two-storey, stone 
houses, though the continuity is occasionally broken by a tall, 
steep, red roof studded with odd dormers, or an overhanging gable, 
which casts a deep shadow across the contracted roadway. Other 
architectural surprises are not wanting. The stroUer over 
the rough cobbles of the ill-paved streets comes again and again 
upon an antique turret protruding from the upper storey of some 
time-stained structure, or upon picturesque wooden houses, with 
their blackened constructive timbers exposed, enclosing panels 
of white plaster. Often the quaint facades are curiously carved 
with heraldic devices, grotesque conceits and odd German letter- 
ing. 

Ambushed behind a shadowy corner is a venerable Roman- 
esque church, its age-seamed walls and medisevel towers bearing 
in many places marks of the devastating hand of time. It may 
well look old, as it is claimed that the edifice was completed by 
the Counts of Sayn before the year 1205. It is certainly one of the 
most ancient in Rhineland, and although the early archives of the 
congregation did not escape the conflagrations of the Thirty 
Years' and other wars, the architecture of the main struct- 
ure bears abundant evidence of its antiquity. It is a 
three-naved basilica of purely Roman features showing no 
traces in its original outlines of the transition from that style 
to the Gothic. Its symmetry has been marred, however, by 
some "improver," who in the pointed period replaced a round 
window, that formerly adorned the circular-depressed place above 
the main entrance with a long one, and who destroyed the agree- 
able proportions of its facade by elevating and pointing the cen- 
tre of the front wall. At the same time a Gothic chapel was 
erected, and later a modern extension was constructed on 



24 The Story of an Old Farm. 

the south-west, in which the Catholics worship. The con- 
gregation housed by the original, or main building, is entitled 
the Evangelical Head-Church — Evangelische Haupt-Kirche. To- 
gether with the congregation of the town of Winningen it was 
among the first in Germany to fall under the sway of the Refor- 
mation. In 1578, Count Henry IV of Sayn, who had become a 
follower of Luther, inherited Bendorf. He at once established a 
Lutheran congregation under the pastorate of Reverend Johannes 
Camerarius and from then till now this little town has been a 
stronghold of Protestantism. More than one American congrega- 
tion can trace its origin to this Rhenish Lutheran Society, and in 
its archives, referring to the first part of the last century, fre- 
quently appear names that a few years later became familiar in 
Hunterdon and Somerset counties, New Jersey. Among them 
those of MoELiCH (Melick), Klein (Kline), Himroth (Himrod), 
Fassbender, Wortman and others. 

To an appreciative American, one who having always lived 
amid the new loves and reveres the old, there are few experi- 
ences in foreign travel more satisfactory than the mere fact of 
being within the shadow of a building that has withstood the ele- 
ments for five or six centuries. So was the writer affected one 
summer morning a few years ago, while standing in the presence 
of this hoary temple, the church of his forefathers. Looking up 
at the crumbling window-arches that pierced its grey, gloomy 
facade, it was difficult to realize that when those walls were new 
the ruined castles which frequent this part of the Rhine were 
alive with steel-encased feudal lords and their armed retainers \ 
that Barbarossa, the red-bearded emperor, had just sunk beneath 
the Asiatic waves, while on the third Crusade ; that the sunny 
lands of what is now southern France were running with the 
blood of those devoted peasants, the Albigenses, in the unholy 
war fathered by that most cruel of all popes, Innocent III; and 
prosecuted by that most bloodthirsty of all commanders, Simon 
de Montfort, that the haughty English barons, on the banks of 
the Thames, were extorting from wicked and degraded King 
John, Magna Charta, that precious document that proved to 
be the foundation of the liberties of all English-speaking people. 
But a truce to mediaeval history; we will pass over five hundred 
years. 



Johannes Starts for America. 25 

Here in Bendorf, in the early part of the eighteenth century, 
lived a sturdy burgher — a tanner and a freeholder of good 
repute — Johannes Moelich, who was born on the twenty-sixth of 
February, 1702. His family comprised four children, equally 
divided as to sex, and his wife Maria Catherina, a rotund Ger- 
man matron who prided herself upon being the daughter of 
Gottfried Kirberger, the burgomaster of Bendorf. Having been 
born on the sixth of January, 1698, she was nearly four years 
the senior of her husband, to whom she had been married on the 
first of November, 1723. As she is familiarly known in family 
annals as Mariah Katrina, by this name she will in future be 
designated on these pages. The children were : Ehrenreich 
(Aaron), born the twelfth of October, 1725 ; Veronica Gerdrutta 
(Fanny), born on the twenty-first of November, 1727; Andreas 
(Andrew), born on the twelfth of December, 1729 ; and Marie 
Cathrine, born on the sixth of December, 1 733. 

One morning, while the year 1735 was yet young, Johannes 
gathered together his family, his household goods and effects, 
including considerable furniture, and taking with him his young- 
est brother Gottfried (Godfrey), departed through the Bach-gsite 
of the to'UTi wall to the bank of the river. Here he embarked 
on one of the clumsy barges of that day and floated away, borne 
up by Father Khine, to Rotterdam, where he took ship and sailed 
for America. This emigrant was the son of Johann Wilhelm 
and Anna Katherine Moelich, who came to Bendorf in 1 688 from 
Winningen,* a town on the Moselle, four miles west of Coblentz. 
They had many relatives and friends in both places, and 
we can well fancy that the departure of Johannes and his 
family was an important event for these communities. It 
woidd be interesting to learn just what cause led to his 
emigration. It could not have been poverty, as was the case 
with many of the thousands of his countrymen who had preceded 
him across the water, for we know that he owned property in 
Bendorf and had ready money for investment in the new country. 
Perhaps he appreciated the responsibility of his little family, and 
hesitated to bring up his children under a government that 
had already brought much misery and distress on its subjects. 

* For description of Wiiiningen ami Bendorf see introduction to geiieaioijy in 
appendix, p. 6'ZS. 



26 The Stokt ok an Old Failm. 

He had already established relations beyoimd the sea, his younger 
brother Johanu Peter having landed at Philadelphia in 1728, 
from the ship Mortonhouse. Doubtless he had received letters 
from this brother, and from friends among the many emigrants 
who had found an asylum in America, drawing an enticing 
picture of the liberal government of William Penn, which had 
secured to them in the fruitful valleys of Pennsylvania peacefril 
retreats where they no longer feared religious persecution or 
political oppression. Between the beginning of the century and 
the time of Johannes' emigration some seventy thousand Ger- 
mans had turned their backs on the mother coimtry and sought 
homes in foreign lands. 

The old world and its people, two hundred years ago, were well 
tired of each other. So some one tells us, and the student of early 
emigration to the American colonies soon discovers abundant 
evidence verifying this statement. He finds that in the latter 
part of the seventeenth and early in the eighteenth centuries a 
countless host of dissatisfied and oppressed Europeans, turning 
their faces from the east, embarked on the frail vessels of that 
period. For weary weeks they rolled and staggered over the 
briny troughs of an almost unknown sea, whose western waves 
broke on the shores of a vast continent that beckoned them 
thitherward as a haven of security and peace ; a new world whose 
hospitable harbors, in the faith of these migrators, seemingly 
offered promises of an asylum free from political oppressions, and 
a retreat ftdl of that repose which they knew from bitter exper- 
iences would be denied them in their own countries. 

The birth of society is no older than is the love of man for the 
land of his nativity. All ordinary rules and principles govern- 
ing the actions of men seem contradicted by emigration from an 
old to a new country, whereby men voluntarily combat the dan- 
gers and difficulties of savage nature in a wilderness beyond the 
seas, after abandoning the graves of their ancestors, the friends 
of a life-time, and the hearth-stones around which have centred 
all the aflfections and sympathetic experiences of their own fam- 
ilies and those of their progenitors. Yet, at the time of which 
we write, notwithstanding the prevalence of this universal and 
world-wide sentiment, it was powerless to stem the great tidal 
wave of humanity that rolled irresistibly America-ward. Ship 



Why Germans Left Fatherland. 27 

after ship, their decks crowded with Scotch refugees, dropped 
anchor off Perth Amboy, enriching, as Grahame writes, East 
Jersey society '' by valuable accessions of virtue that had been 
refined by adversity, and piety that was invigorated by persecu- 
tion." Quakers and Dissenters from Old England landed in 
Pennsylvania, and Puritans from that same little island joined 
their brethren in Massachusetts, augmenting that sturdy stock 
who were laying the foundations of the future American nation. 
The forests, which had for centuries fringed both banks of the 
Delaware, were felled by the brawny arms of fair-haired Swedes. 
Huguenots, among them the best blood of France, as well as her 
most skilled artisans, swelled the population of New York and 
the more southern provinces, while rotund Hollanders, smoking 
long Delft pipes, still sailed their high-pooped shallops up Hud- 
son's river, settling on its shores, and penetrating to the little 
Dutch settlement which has since grown to be the capital of a 
great State. Though home-seekers, these latter had not left 
Holland from religious or political motives. 

But nowhere on the continent of Europe did this spirit of 
unrest hover with greater persistency than over the beautiful val- 
leys of the Rhine and its tributaries. The cycle of the eighteenth 
century had not rolled away many of its years before thousands 
of Germans had turned their backs on all they would naturally 
hold most dear and sought homes in foreign lands. Expatriation 
is a severe ordeal even when the native shores of the exile are 
stertile and barren of fruitfulness ; how much more severe must 
be this experience to one who, by unjust laws and an unright- 
eous government, is forced to sever the invisible links of affec- 
tion that bind him to a land of pleasant abundance, and a home 
seated amid environments of picturesqueness and beauty. 

The Teuton is by nature stable ; his affections intuitively take 
deep root in the soil of his native land, and no one holds in 
greater reverence the sacred names of home and fatherland. 
How, then, do we account for this great exodus from Germany, 
especially from those fair regions bordering the valleys of the 
Rhine, the Moselle, the Nahr and the sinuous Neckar ? If his 
native hills, rivers and homesteads are so dear, how is it tliat at 
the present day we find the German to be in the greatest num- 
ber of all the foreign population in far-away America f To 



28 The Story of ax Old Farm. 

properly answer this question it will be necessary to consider 
the political aspect of Germany at the time referred to, and to 
take a hurried retrospective glance at the history and condition 
of the common people for several anterior decades. 

One does not delve very deep in Continental annals of the 
eighteenth century without discovering that at this time the 
condition of Germany was most deplorable. Many of the innum- 
erable kingdoms, duchies, principalities, independent towns and 
free cities that were strewed disconnectedly over the land 
between the Rhine and the Danube had rulers who claimed an 
almost absolute sway over their hapless subjects. They often 
demanded their lives, their fortunes, their services ; the latter not 
called upon always for the benefit and protection of their own 
country or community, but to be bartered for gold to other gov- 
ernments. Successive furious wars had raged with but short 
intermission for several generations. And the end was not 
yet ; the map of Europe was to undergo many changes, and 
the destiny of all Germany was to be determined. The great 
Frederick was yet to mould his small kingdom into the powerful 
nation of Prussia. Even when that work was accomplished, and 
fifty years after that illustrious king had returned from the Seven 
Years' War, the German people gathered themselves together 
for the greatest struggle they had yet attempted ; but it was with 
happier hearts and a more abounding faith that they entered 
into this contest, for they felt the glow of a national patriotism, 
and each blow struck was for a common cause and fatherland. 
The sun of peace, prosperity and greatness, as has been well 
said, did not rise on Germany till the year 1813, which saw the 
end of the prolonged struggle that may be considered to have 
commenced with the Thirty Years' War. 

But we must go back of the year 1700 to look for the original 
cause of German emigration. In the early part of the seven- 
teenth century the peasants, burghers and the great middle- 
class of Germany were well to do. The prosperity was occa- 
sioned by the long continued peace, giving to the people the 
opportunity of cultivating their fields and promoting agriculture, 
the foundation of opulence in all countries. Some historians 
consider that garden and field cultivation in 1618 were superior 
to that of two hundred years later, arguing that the present cen- 



The Thirty Years' War Overwhelms Germany, 29 

tury has only seen Germany brought back agriculturally to 
•where it was those long years ago. Tillage, of course, produced 
much less variety, many of the grains and vegetables of the pre- 
sent century being then unknown. Flax was a staple, and much 
money was made from the cultivation of anise and saffron. 
Everywhere were vineyards, and in the fields were to be seen 
hops, wheat, horsebeans, turnips, teazel and rape. The houses 
were much inferior to those of to-day, but they were not defi- 
cient in interior comforts. Many a German matron of the pre- 
sent time exhibits with pride the curiously carved chairs and 
cupboards, ornamented spinning wheels, and treasures of earth- 
ernware and drinking vessels that, having escaped the vicissi- 
tudes of the years gone by, have been handed down to her as 
precious heirlooms of those ancient days. 

Ye», it was a happy time for the common people of Germany. 
The scars of war were healed. Of course they had their bur- 
dens. The nobles were oppressive. There was the door tax, 
the window-tax, and other heavy impositions, and much that was 
earned must go to support the comforts and luxuries of the cas- 
tles and manorial houses. But as the people knew nothing of 
true liberty they were satisfied and happy in following their 
peaceful avocations. They gave no thought to war, or to the 
fact that the politics of Germany was a bubbling cauldron of 
conflicting interests, on the verge of boiling over, and little they 
recked of the horrors in store for them in the near future. 
What did they know of the bloody horoscope that was being 
cast by the disputes of the house of Hapsburg and the German 
rulers, or of the princes that were unfurling the banners of the 
two hostile religious pai'ties? In Catholic commimities the inhab- 
itants were well content with their parish priests, and in the 
Protestant towns and hamlets the faithful pastors filled all the 
needs of the people. In the village Gasthaus, in the evenings, 
there may have been talk of fighting and suffering in Bohemia ; 
but it mattered little to the villagers, as they drank their beer 
and smoked their porcelain pipes, except as furnishing subject 
for chat and wonder. As the months and years rolled on, 
rumors grew more rife, and localities named grew much nearer ; 
by 1623 it was in Thuringia that conflicts were reported ; by 
the next year there was no longer any doubt that Middle Ger- 



30 The Story of an Old Farm. 

many was being overrun by foreign troops; in a few months the 
Spanisli soldiers, under General Spinola, bi'oke in the lower 
Palatinate, and all the miseries of war fell upon the entire Rhine 
valley. For over a quarter of a century the whole country was 
devastated by contesting armies. Hordes of Cossacks, Poles, 
Walloons, Irish, Spaniards, Italians, English, Danes, Finns and 
Swedes, together with their camp followers, tramped over Ger- 
man soil, settling like swarms of locusts on the comfortable vil- 
lages and fat fields, obliterating in a few months' stay in a local- 
ity every vestige of the accumulations of years of patient toil. 

Readers of German history are familiar with the bitterness 
and woe of the next three decades, — an epoch fraught with such 
distress that the mind almost refuses to contemplate the detailed 
and prolonged sufferings of the German people. Gustav Freytag, 
who has pictured in strong outline the desolations of this 
time, considers the reason that the war raged for a whole gener- 
ation and exhausted a powerful people was because none of the 
contending parties were able to prosecute it on a grand or deci- 
sive scale. He claims that the largest army in the Thirty 
Years' War did not equal an ordinary corps of modern times. 
The Austrian commander, Tilly, thought forty thousand to be 
the greatest body of men that a general could properly handle; 
during the war it was rare that an army reached that magni- 
tude. The fighting was mostly done by smaller bands distrib- 
uted over a wide area of country, and the distress brought upon 
the communities was not more caused by the sacking and pil- 
lage of the soldiery than by the wretched system of camp follow- 
ers in vogue at that time. Not only the officers but the privates, 
also, were accompanied on their campaigns by wives, mistresses 
and children; they, in their train, often had a following of a 
much worse character, and all the dissolute men and women of a 
community were generally to be found about the camp of an 
occupying arm}^ 

This condition of affairs was not confined to the foreign sol- 
diers, but the evil also attached to the German troops. Wall- 
hausen reckons as indispensable to a German regiment of infan- 
try four thousand women, children and other followers. At the 
close of the war in 1648, General Gronsfeld reports that the 
Imperial and Bavarian armies contained forty thousand drawing 



The Treaty of Westphalia Brings Peace. 31 

rations, and one hundred and forty thousand who did not. These 
figures give some slight idea of the horrors of war at that period. 
Picture an army made up of many nationalities, with its greater 
army of followers, largely composed of the depraved of both sexes 
from all parts of Europe. The troops were paid, clothed and 
fed by their respective governments; but what of the great out- 
lying camp? It^ could only subsist and exist by thieving, 
oppression and crime. The thatch was torn from the cottages 
that the horses of the marauders might be bedded. The cottages 
were razed to furnish materials for building huts. The carts 
were taken from the yards, the oxen from their stalls. The pas- 
sage of an army meant the entire disappearance of all the cattle. 
The immense flocks of parish sheep that nibbled the grass on 
the sides of the stony heights and roamed over the abundant ver- 
dure of the meadows found their way to the roasting-ovens and 
stew-pots of the great mob, and the national wool of Germany, 
known in every market of the world, was lost forever. The 
large cities proved a place of refuge for the upper classes, as in 
them some semblance of government and order was maintained ; 
but for the country people there were no such retreats. They 
were robbed and maltreated ; and if they did not promptly dis- 
close the hiding places of their treasures, were beaten, maimed 
and often killed. Their lads swelled the ranks of the soldiery; 
their daughters, alas, were often kidnapped and coerced into the 
ranks of the concubines. Did an array remain long in one local- 
ity fear seized upon the inhabitants; and the effect of the feel- 
ing of terror and insecurity, and the horribly vicious associations 
with which they were surrounded, produced a condition of 
despair and moral recklessness which were appalling. Frequently 
the villagers themselves turned robbers, wives deserted their 
husbands, childi'en their parents, and many fled to the mountains 
and forest for a place of safety. It was a time when the face of 
Jehovah seemed turned away from Germany — when the whole 
land apparently lay under the shadow of the Almighty dis- 
pleasure ! 

The middle of the century brought peace. The thirty years 
of tears and blood were over. The graves could not give up 
their dead ; the treaty of Westphalia might assert the triumphs 
of religious and political liberty in Germany, but it could not 



32 The Story of an Old Farm. 

restore the virtue of the dissolute, nor the prosperity of the com- 
munities. Nor did the sorrows end with the war ; there were 
still desolated homes, abject poverty and rampant crime ! For 
thirty years the vagrants of Europe had made Germany their 
abidin<^ place. They did not all leave with the troops, but wan- 
dered about the country, a disorderly rabble, terrorizing the 
people. Still there was peace ! Bells were ringing, bonfires 
burning, and in the cities peace banquets were spread, and 
anthems sung. The rocky fastnesses, the distant forests and the 
larger cities gave up their refugees. The people again gathered 
in their dismantled villages and on their wasted lands, the gut- 
ted fields were inspected, holes in the barns repaired, and their 
damaged and often tottering houses were made habitable. The 
broken links of society were welded, and the forging of the great 
chain of progress and growth which had been so rudely broken 
was again undertaken. 

Recuperation, however, was slow, and the impoverishment of 
the people so great as to render them almost helpless. In some 
neighborhoods sixty per cent, of the population had disappeared, 
and three-fifths — yes, four^fifths — of all property had been dis- 
sipated. Furniture, tools and utensils were gone, and the peas- 
ants in again attempting their industrial pursuits found them- 
selves almost in a state of nature. In some principalities the 
improvement was more rapid than in others. Prussia was raised 
from the lowest depths of misery and desolation by the energy 
and wisdom of Frederic William, the great Elector, who ruled 
from 1640 to 1688, and in the south and east, where the country 
enjoyed the blessings of peace for comparatively a number of 
years, slow but continued strides were made toward betterment. 
But on the western frontier and along the valley of the Rhine 
and its tributaries no such opportunity was given the exhausted 
people for regeneration and revival. Peace had not come to 
stay ! For nearly a century yet, these fair regions were to lie 
devastated and prostrate, the plunder and fighting ground of 
France and her allies. 

I have dwelt thus long on the detailed horrors of the Thirty 
Years' War, and the subsequent years, because it was a time fated 
to have a momentous efi'ect on the future of our own country. 
The result of that cruel contest, and the after-paralyzed condi- 



Germany the Fighting Ground of Europe. 33 

tion of affairs, was the tide of emigration that rose toward the 
close of that century, swelled to a great flood in the next one 
hundred years, and since then has rolled, and even now is rolling, 
a vast human sea of Germans across the American continent. 
Without doubt other influences assisted and encouraged this 
great movement. Despotic princes, petty differences between 
small states, sumptuary laws, extortions, and cruel conscriptions 
in later wars, all helped to wean the German from his country. 
The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, which cost France 
seven hundred thousand of her best citizens, brought much suf- 
fering on the Protestants of Germany. Huguenots from over 
the borders flocked in great numbers to the shelter afforded by 
the Lutheran Palatine elector. This insured to that prince and 
his people the vengeance of Madame de Maintenon ; she gave 
peremptory orders, through Louvois, that the Palatinate should 
be utterly destroyed, and one hundred thousand French soldiers 
were despatched by Louis XIV. to do the work. Thousands of 
Germans were forced to escape religious persecution by flight. 
But the original idea of emigration, the first setting in motion of 
the ball of expatriation, was due to that foundation of all Ger- 
many's subsequent miseries, the Thirty Years' War ; and had it 
not been for that prolonged conflict, which so weakened the 
country as to render the people unable to withstand their future 
trials, our nation would to-day be without millions of citizens who 
now honor it, and make it the greater, because of their intelli- 
gence, industry, frugality and virtue. 

In 1672 Louis XIV. astonished Europe by the rapidity with 
which he conquered three provinces and forty fortresses in Hol- 
land ; but the dykes were cut and the newly elected stadtholder, 
WiUiam of Orange, formed an alliance with Germany and 
Spain. In the several years of war that followed, the Rhine 
country was repeatedly ravaged, the devastation earning for 
General Turenne and the French the execration of the world. 
Hardly had this war terminated by the treaty of Nymeguen, in 
1679, before Louis XIV. laid claim to several German territor- 
ies, leading to another distressing contest of four years, the 
Rhenish provinces bearing the brunt of the suffering. The treaty 
of Ratisbon, in 1684, ended this conflict, but within two years 
William III. of England formed the league of Augsburg against 



34 The Story of an Old Farm. 

France, and in 1688 Louis' army was again desolating the Pal- 
atinate and other portions of Germany with fire and sword, 
destroying the towns, villages and castles, until to this day, from 
Drachenfels to Heidelberg, the line of march is marked by 
crumbling walls, ruined battlements, and blown-up towers. A 
short rest was brought the Germans by the peace of Ryswick, in 
1697 ; but it is useless to continue the narrative of Germany's 
wars through the conflict of the Spanish Succession, Frederic the 
Great's campaigns, and the continuous fighting of the eighteenth 
century. Sufficient has been recounted in the above rapid 
review to bring before the mind of the reader ample evidence 
to show why the Germans, especially those of what is now 
Rhenish Prussia, should have, notwithstanding their love of 
home, been so impoverished and disheartened as to be constrained 
to sorrowfully turn their backs on Germany, and seek in the new 
world that peace, freedom and protection which had been denied 
to them and their fathers on their native soil. 




CHAPTER IV. 

German Expatriation — The Distribution of Teuton Emigrants in 
the American Colonics, 

In the preceding chapter an endeavor has been made to show 
that even early in the seventeenth century the Germans had 
good cause for deserting fatherland. When resolved on expatri- 
ation their steps nearly all turned westward, and they seemed of 
one mind as to what coimtry offered the greatest inducements to 
home-seekers, and presented the most complete assurances of 
relief from the heavy burdens under which they had groaned in 
Europe. The tide of emigration set steadily toward America, 
and from those early days till now, the name and thought of our 
country has been as a sweet savor in the nostrils of oppressed 
Teutons. Commencing as a little rill the current gradually 
increased in volume, until, as we learn from recently published 
statistics, between 1880 and 1884 the yearly exodus from Ger- 
many averaged nearly one hundred and seventy-five thousand 
souls ; while of two millions, six hundred and one thousand Ger- 
mans now living outside of the Empire, two millions are citizens 
of the United States. 

There is no accurate record of the earliest Teuton emigration 
to America. Edward Eggleston, a diligent student of colonial 
history, claims that Germans came with the colonists of Massa- 
chusetts Bay, and, without doubt, some of the so-called Dutch of 
the New Netherlands were High Dutch, or Germans, from the 
Rhine, beyond the Holland border. Before the close of 
the Thirty Years' War the vast movement from the Rhine 
country may be said to have commenced, and the year 1640 
found Germans settled on the Delaware in the Swedish 
colony planted by the Lutheran king, Gustavus Adolphus. 



36 The Story of an Old Farm. 

But until 1682 the arrival of immigrants in this country 
was neither frequent nor regular. In the preceding year 
William Penn had advertised to the world his liberal govern- 
ment, and offered in Pennsylvania homes for the persecuted and 
oppressed of all nations. Penn had acquired his great American 
grant of forty thousand square miles of territory from the Crown, 
in payment of a debt of sixteen thousand pounds due his father. 
The King named the tract after the elder Penn, and it is inter- 
esting to know, as illustrating the modesty and simplicity of the 
son, that he sitrongly objected to this appellation, even going so 
far as to attempt the bribing of an under-secretary, that the name 
might be changed. In 1683 Francis Daniel Pastorious, a Fran- 
conian German of education, arrived with other immigrants at 
Philadelphia, taking up land at Germantown, commencing that 
settlement with thirteen families. Arents Klincken erected the 
first two-storey house, Penn being present, and helping to eat the 
" raising dinner." Within a few years the settlement was aug- 
mented by the arrival of over one thousand Germans, among 
whom were the ancestors of the present prominent Pennsylvania 
families of Rittenhouse, Shoemaker, Carpenter, Potts and Van 
Wart. The most of them came from near the city of Worms, in 
Westphalia. They must have felt grateful for their quiet 
provincial homes when they heard of the dreadful ravages of the 
French, in 1689, who laid waste the entire country from which 
they had emigrated, the flames rising from every hamlet, market 
place and parish church in the Duchy of Cleves, in which Worms 
is situated. 

The greatest influx of Germans commenced about 1700. 
Within the following twenty-five years vast numbers fled from 
the desolations and persecutions at home to the English colonies 
in America, and it is estimated that over fifty thousand within 
that time reached the province of Pennsylvania. A few miles 
from Bendorf, on the Hhine, is the well built and attractive town 
of Neuwied ; it has now a population of about ten thousand, com- 
prising Romanists, Lutherans, Moravian Brethren, Baptists and 
Jews, who live together in harmony. Count Frederic of Wied, 
whose descendants still occupy the spacious palace at its north 
end, founded the town in 1653, on the site of the village of Lan- 
gendorf, which was entirely destroyed in the Thirty Years' War. 



The Settlement of German Valley, N. J. 37 

Here, in 1705, arrived a number of Lutherans, who had fled from 
persecutions at Wolfenbrdttel and Halberstadt. The then Count 
of Wied, who welcomed all comers without distinction of religion, 
gave them residence and protection. Here they remained 
for some time, and then went on down the river to Holland, 
where they embarked, in 1707, for New York. After a severe 
and protracted voyage a violent storm drove their small ship 
south of Sandy Hook, obliging the master to take refuge in the 
capes of the Delaware, and ultimately land his passengers at 
Philadelphia. Determined to continue to the province of New 
York the immigrants left the Quaker City, journeying overland. 
Travelling, thitherward, they reached the crest of the Schooley's 
Mountain range, in Morris County, New Jersey, and were sud- 
denly confronted by the view of a charming valley. Below were 
the pleasant reaches of the Musconetcong, flowing tranquilly 
between grassy banks, with rich meadows rolling back in gentle 
undulations, seeming fairly to invite settlement. To these tem- 
pest-tossed wanderers it appeared, indeed, a land of promise ; 
what more could they desire in a search for homes ? New York 
province certainly would offer no richer or more inviting local- 
ity, so here they decided to remain. Descending the mountain side 
they drove their tent stakes, and laid their hearth-stones, as the 
commencement of a settlement which has been known from that 
day to this as the German Valley. It is claimed that many now 
well-known families in Morris, Hunterdon and Somerset Counties 
take their origin from this ancient little Lutheran community.* 

*This account of the first settlement of German Valley is based on statements 
made in Rupps' " Early German Emigrants to Pennsylvania," Mott's "First 
Century of Hunterdon County," Blauvelt's "Historical Sketch of the German 
Reformed and Presbyterian Church of German Valley," and Snell's " History of 
Hunterdon and Somerset Counties." Persons well informed in the history of 
Morris and Hunterdon doubt this story ; indeed, do not hesitate to deny the pos- 
sibility of its truth. Various objections are made to the belief that these Bruns- 
wick and Prussian emigrants were the progenitors of the present resident Ger- 
man families of Clinton, Lebanon and Tewksbury, in Hunterdon, and of Wash- 
ington, in Morris county. The most tenable one advanced is that there is not a 
particle of documentary evidence to show that there were many, if any, Ger- 
mans occupying the region now forming those townships previous to the year 
1720, and that the family names of Pickel, Welch, Apgar, Alspaugh, Philhower, 
Kline, Rhinehart, Eick and others, which liave been credited as being those of 
persons descended from those persecuted immigrants, can all be accounted for as 
importations after the year 1720, and most of them after 1730. 



38 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Hendi'ick Hudson, after his voyage in the "Half- Moon," in 
1609, in writing of the locality on which now, a populous cres- 
cent, the city of Newburgh rests, mentions it as "a pleasant 
place to build a town on." As the Palatine parish of Quassaick, 
on this "pleasant place," a town was laid out, about one hun- 
dred years later, by emigrants from Germany. The company 
comprised forty-two persons, who, under the guidance of their 
pastor, Joshua Kockerthal, had been sent to America by Queen 
Anne, who had guaranteed them nine pence a day for a year's 
support, and a grant of land on which to settle. They had been 
driven to the fields in mid-winter by the destruction of their 
homes by the French, and had applied to the English govern- 
ment for aid, as Protestants who were suffering from abject pov- 
erty, because of their religious beliefs. On reaching New York 
Lord Lovelace had them transported to Quassaick creek, and 
ultimately his successor, Grovernor Hunter, issued to them a 
patent for twenty-one hundred and ninety acres of land. The 
first place of worship in Newburgh was a little Lutheran church, 
twenty feet square, built by these foreigners. The settlement 
as a German community did not prosper. The Palatines, 
who were mostly husbandmen, found the rough hillsides much 
inferior for cultivation to the rich lands they had known over the 
seas. Attracted by descriptions from friends, located in Pennsyl- 
vania, of the fertile regions they inhabited, the individual own- 
ers gradually sold the plots originally apportioned them and 
removed to that Quaker colony. By 1743 practically the place 
had changed from a German settlement to a Scotch-English 
neighborhood. Notwithstanding the comparatively short time 
the Palatines lived on Quassaick creek, they left an indelible 
mark on the country, and a record of which the people of New- 
burgh are still proud. That city's historian, E. M. Rutten- 
ber, writes that "no citizens of more substantial worth are found 
under the flag of this, their native land, than their descendants; 
no braver men were in the armies of the Revolution than Herki- 
mer and Muhlenberg. Had they done nothing in the parish but 
made clearings in its forests and planted fields they would be 
entitled to grateful remembrance; but they did more — they gave 
to it its first church and its first government, and in all its sub- 
sequent history their descendants have had a part." 



Thirteen Thousand Germans Reach London in 1709. 39 

The citizens of London were astonished to learn, in May and 
June, 1709, that five thousand men, women and children, Ger- 
mans from the Rhine, were under tents in the suburbs. By 
October the number had increased to thirteen thousand, and 
comprised husbandmen, tradesmen, school teachers and minis- 
ters. These emigrants had deserted the Palatinate, owing to 
French oppression and the persecution by their prince, the 
elector John William, of the House of Newburgh, who had 
become a devoted Romanist, though his subjects were mainly 
Lutherans and Calvinists. Professor Henry A. Homes, in a 
paper treating of this emigration read before the Albany Insti- 
tute in 1871, holds that the movement was due not altogether to 
unbearable persecutions, but largely to suggestions made to the 
Palatines in their own country by agents of companies who were 
anxious to obtain settlers for the British colonies in America, 
and thus give value to the company's lands. The emigrants 
were certainly seized with the idea that by going to England 
its government would transport them to the provinces of New 
York, the Carolinas and Pennsylvania. Of the latter province 
they knew much, as many Germans were already there. Pas- 
torious, the founder of Germantown, had published circulars in 
Germany, extolling the colony and inviting settlement. Penn 
had also well advertised in the Palatinate the inducements for 
settlers offered by his grant. The emigrants may have heard of 
the success of Pastor Kockerthal's little colony which had gone 
to New York the previous year, and they were all eager to be 
transported to a country where rich lands were to be had at no 
cost, and where their efforts for subsistence would be undis- 
turbed by oppressions. 

The English government was much distressed by the arrival 
of this vast number of impoverished emigrants. Their coming 
not having been anticipated, no plans had been made for their 
distribution in the colonies, or their care in England. Means 
were taken at once to notify the Dutch and German authorities 
that no more would be received. This certainly had the sym- 
pathy of the elector Palatine, who had already published an 
order punishing with death and confiscation all subjects who 
should quit their native country. Great efibrts were made to 
prevent suffering among these poor people; thousands of pounds 



40 The Story of an Old Farm. 

were collected for their maintenance from churches and individ- 
uals all over England; they were lodged in warehouses, empty 
dwellings and in barns, and the queen had a thousand tents 
pitched for them back of Greenwich, on Blackheath. Here, on 
that historic moor, where Wat Tyler and Jack Cade had 
assembled the rebellious men of Kent, and where later, Claude 
Duval, and other bold riders of the road, were wont to relieve 
belated travellers of their gold and jewels, was presented the 
strange spectacle of an encampment of five thousand alien peo- 
ple, speaking an alien tongue, awaiting with patience and confid- 
ence a help and relief they felt sure would come from the sym- 
pathy and compassion of Protestant Englishmen. 

Although Mortimer, in his "History of England," says it was 
never known who encouraged them to this emigration, a com- 
mittee of the House of Commons appointed in 1711 elicited 
facts, as its report shows, going to prove that the Queen's gov- 
ernment was not altogether guiltless in provoking the move- 
ment. The Palatines testified that they had left their country 
because of books and papers containing Queen Anne's picture 
that had been distributed, urging their coming to England that 
they might be sent to Her Majesty's plantations in the colonies. 
It is hardly to be believed that they would have come almost at 
one time, and in such great numbers, without having received 
encouragement from agents or others, who must, at least appar- 
ently, have made promises with authority. The Germans evi- 
dently expected that immediately on arrival in England they 
were to be dispatched in a body across the sea; but no one 
stood ready to carry out such a programme. If the government 
had made promises it was with expectation of no such liberal 
response. To carry thirteen thousand people would require a 
great fleet of the small vessels of that time, and there were no 
ships for such a service. Much time would also be required in 
preparing for their arrival in America, and in perfecting arrange- 
ments for their final settlement. Notwithstanding the great 
efibrts made by the English people, very much distress followed 
this unhappy hegira. Disease decimated their ranks, and 
many wandered about England, becoming a poverty-stricken 
incubus on the parishes. Numbers of the younger men enlisted 
in the British army serving in Portugal, and some made their 



Palatines Settle in Ireland in 1710. 41 

own way to Pennsylvania, presumably by effecting arrangements 
with the masters of vessels, whereby, on arrival, their services 
were to be sold for a term sufficient to secure payment of their 
passage-money. This was not an unusual means of emigration 
to the colonies at that time. 

The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland petitioned the Queen that 
some of the people might be sent to him, and by February, 1710, 
thirty-eight hundred had been located across the Irish Sea, in 
the province of Munster, near Limerick. The government 
granted them temporary help, and within three years twenty- 
four hundred pounds had been expended on their removal and 
maintenance while settling. In 1715 they became naturalized 
citizens. Professor Homes recites in his monograph that they 
'' now number about twelve thousand souls, and, under the name 
of Palatinates, continue to impress a peculiar character upon the 
whole district they inhabit, both in a social and economical way." 
Farrar writes of them, in the beginning of this century, that they 
have " left off sauer-kraut and taken up potatoes, though still 
preserving their own language;" that "their superstitions savor 
of the banks of the Rhine, and in their dealings they are 
upright and honorable." Kohl, a German traveller of 1840, 
testifies that they have not lost their home character for probity 
and honor, and that they are much wealthier than any of their 
neighbors. 

According to "Luttrell's Diary" about one-tenth of the whole 
number that reached England were returned by the Crown to 
Grermany. This action of the authorities seems to have been 
provoked in consequence of the portion returned not being Prot- 
estants, and for that reason out of favor. 

Among the exiles were a large number of people from Heidel- 
berg. Professor Rupp thinks that more than six thousand per- 
sons had left that vicinity within twelve months. They had suffered 
persecution because unable to change their religion as often as 
did their government. The Elector Palatine, Frederic II., 
became a Lutheran ; Frederic III. turned Calvinist ; Ludovic V. 
restored the Lutheran Church, while his son and successor 
embraced the Calvinist faith ; he was succeeded by a Catholic 
prince who cruelly oppressed the Protestants. All travellers 
remember with pleasure the beautiful university town of Heidel- 



42 The Story of an Old Farm. 

berg, that, almost hidden in dense foliage, occupies a narrow- 
bench of land between the lofty Konigstuhl and the restless 
Neckar, which here forces its foamy way through a narrow 
gorge to the broad Rhine plain, just below. Away up on the 
side of the mountain, clinging to the very edge of a wooded 
precipice, is the most magnificent ruin in Middle Europe. The 
royal residence and stronghold of generations of electors, it was 
three hundred years in growing from a castle to a palace ; then 
came the French, with their claim to the Palatinate, and this 
royal architectural pile was battered and desolated, but fortu- 
^ nately not entirely destroyed. Beyond the castle, higher up, on a 
little plateau, is a restaurant and garden — the Wolfsbrunnen. 
Here the citizens of the town meet on Sundays, fete days and 
holidays to listen to music, and chat under the trees with their 
neighbors. As they blow the foam from their cool steins of beer 
and overlook the ivy-clad ruin, with its quadrangles, bastions, 
moated exterior walls, and graceful interior fagades studded with 
sculptures and statues, they must find abimdant subjects for 
thought and conversation. If they are inclined to "mourn over 
Israel " they need not give all their tears to the defacement of 
that effective mass of stone ; their minds and sympathies can 
revert to the miseries of their townspeople in the years gone by, 
before they had become a portion of United Germany. 

In the early part of the Thirty Years' War the imperial Count 
Tilly sacked Heidelberg, putting five hundred of the inhabitants 
to death. Later on, in the same war, the generals of the French 
captured the city, and people without number w^ere slaughtered. 
In 1688 the French were again in Heidelberg ; this time they 
burned the place to the ground, reducing the castle, and blowing 
up its ancient and massive corner tower, although the walls were 
twenty-one feet thick ; one-half of the structure fell into the 
moat below, where it lies intact to this day, a most picturesque 
ruin. Heidelberg was rebuilt only to be once more, in 1693, 
overwhelmed by the armies of Louis XIV.; flames again rose 
from every building, and the citizens — men, women and children 
— fifteen thousand in number, stripped of everything, were 
turned at night into the fields. Not long after, the elector 
induced the inhabitants to rebuild the town under a promise of 
liberty of conscience and thirty years' exemption from taxes. 



Germans in Virginia and North Carolina. 43 

Within a few years this same elector, growing more devoted to 
his Romanist faith, served God in his fashion, which was by 
breaking his promises, and beginning severe persecutions against 
his Protestant subjects. It was then, Rupp tells us, that thou- 
•sands from this vicinity, despairing of a future at home, escaped to 
England. • 

Before we return to Blackheath, where we left some of them 
under tents, let me place in strong contrast to the wretchedness 
just portrayed the picture a traveller draws, a few years later, of 
the happiness and peace of Germans in the American colonies. 
Some time before 1745 Germans from Pennsylvania penetrated 
the Shenandoah Valley, near Harrisonburg, Virginia. The 
traveller, before referred to, visited that neighborhood during the 
French and English war, and writes as follows of the country 
and people : 

The low grounds upon the banks of the Shenandoah River are very rich and 
fertile. They are chiefly settled by Germans, who gain a sufBcient livelihood by 
raising stock for the troops and sending butter down into the lower part of the 
country. I could not but reflect with pleasure on the situation of these people 
^nd think if there is such a thing as happiness in this life they enjoy it. Far 
from the bustle of the world they live in the most delightful climate and on the 
richest soil imaginable. They are everywhere surrounded with beautiful pros- 
pects and sylvan scenes — lofty mountains, transparent streams, falls of water, rich 
valleys and majestic woods ; the whole interspersed with an infinite variety of 
flowery shrubs constitute the landscapes surrounding them. They are subject to 
few diseases, are generally robust and live in perfect liberty. They know no 
wants, and are acquainted with but few vices. They possess what many princes 
would give half their dominions for — health, contentment and tranquiiity of mind. 
— Hoiue's Coll. of Va. 

The Lord Proprietors of Carolina agreed, in 1709, with Chris- 
topher de Graffenried and Lewis Michell,from Switzerland, to sell 
to them ten thousand acres of land in one body, between the Cape 
Fear and Neuse rivers. They formed a land company,* and, of 
course, were much in needof settlers. They covenanted with the 
English authorities for the transfer of about seven hundred of these 
poor Heidelberg refugees to the colony. Before the end of the year 
they had arrived with them at a point in North Carolina, where 
the rivers Neuse and Trent join. Here they established a town, 
calling it New-Berne, in honor of Berne, Switzerland, de Graffen- 
ried's birthplace. Each man, woman and child was granted one 
hundred acres of land, tools for building houses and cultivating 
the soil, and with provisions for twelve months' subsistence. De 



44 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Graffenried proved false to these people. In their ignorance, they 
failed to secui-e titles, and later on he mortgaged the entire grant 
for eight hundred pounds, and the lands ultimately, through fore- 
closure, fell into the hands of the heirs of the mortgagee. Notwith- 
standing this great check to their prosperity, the Germans, by their 
industry and economy, acquired other property and comfortable 
homes. Many years later they petitioned the king, and were partly 
indemniiied by a grant of ten thousand acres, free for ten years 
from quit-rents. As is the experience of all new colonies, they 
at first suffered great trials and privations. Before two years 
had passed, one hundred of their number had been massacred by 
the Tuscarora Indians. But, as is shown by Williamson, the 
historian of North Carolina, their industry and frugality 
triumphed over all obstacles, and the stale is to-day greatly bene- 
fited by the wealth and holdings of the descendants of these perse- 
cuted emigrants from the valley of the Neckar. 

It has not been found possible to properly account for all the 
thirteen thousand Palatines who reached England. Queen Anjie 
sent some of them to Virginia, settling them above the falls of 
the Rappahanock, in Spottsylvania County, from whence they 
spread into several adjoining counties, and into North Carolina. 
Irving mentions that when George Washington, in 1748, was sur- 
veying lands in this portion of Virginia, he was followed by Ger- 
man immigrants with their wives and children. Most of them 
could not speak English, but when spoken to answered in their 
native tongue. " Such were the progenitors of the sturdy yeo- 
manry now inhabiting those parts, many of whom still preserve 
their strong German characteristics." 

After the Irish transportation, the largest number that was 
moved in one body, and probably the final one under government 
auspices, was the fleet-load that in the spring of 1710 was des- 
patched to New York. Lord Lovelace having died, Robert Hun- 
ter was commissioned as '' Captain General, Governor-in-Chief 
of and to the provinces of New York and New Jersey and 
territories thereunto belonging, and Vice-Admiral and Chan- 
cellor of the same." Gordon writes of him as a man of merit 
and personal beauty, and a friend of Steele, Addison, Swift and 
the wits and the literati of that day. His appointment was said 
to have been due to the influence of his friend Addison, who at 



GrOVERNOR ROBERT HUNTER AND THE PALATINES. 45 

that time was Under-Secretary of State. He had received in 
1705 the commission as Lieutenant-Governor of Virginia, but 
while on his way to that colony his ship was captured by the 
French, who carried him a prisoner to Paris, where he was con- 
fined for some months. On reaching the colonies Governor 
Hunter, growing much interested in the province of East Jersey, 
became a large owner of its lands, acquiring tracts and planta- 
tions both north and south of the Raritan, and probably in Hun- 
terdon, for we find that in 1713-14, when that county was set 
off, it was named in his honor. The Governor established a home 
at Perth Amboy, on the bluff overlooking the lower bay and 
ocean. Here he retired when in need of rest from the labors of 
the New York administration, and while enjoying the beautiful 
panorama of hills, islands and watery expanse, and the sea 
breezes blowing fresh from Sandy Hook, employed his leisure 
by correspondence with Swift, Addison, and other English friends. 
In 1719 Hunter went to London and did not return to this 
country ; while there he exchanged with William Burnett, son 
of the celebrated bishop, who succeeded him in the executive 
office. He did not, however, lose his interest in New Jersey, 
but continued to acquire land in the province, and retained his 
friendship with the people through correspondence. 

Before this royal governor embarked for America he was 
invited by the Board of Trade to make suggestions regarding 
the disposition of the remaining Palatines. Among the many 
plans proposed it was decided to transfer them to the New York 
colony, for the purpose of engaging in raising and manufacturing 
tar, resin and turpentine for naval purposes. A fleet of ten 
ships set sail with Governor Hunter in March, having on board, 
as is variously estimated, between three and four thousand Ger- 
mans. They covenanted before embarking that after arrival 
they would labor for a sufficient time to discharge the cost of 
their transportation and settlement, after which each emigrant 
was to receive forty acres of land, exempt from taxation for 
seven years. The voyage was of nearly five months' duration, 
the ships arriving at intervals between the middle of June and 
the last of July. The immigrants were encamped on Nut, now 
Governor's Island, for about three months, when a tract of six thou- 
sand acres of the Livingston patent was purchased for them, one 



46 Thk Stoky of an Old Fahm. 

hundred miles up the Hudson, the locality now being embraced in 
Gerraantown, Columbia County. Eight hundred acres were also 
acquired on the opposite side of the river at the present location 
of Saugerties, in Ulster county. To these two points most of the 
immigrants were removed. Professor Homes names twenty-two 
hundred and nine as the greatest number settling on the river; 
the papers signed by the Palatines themselves in the "Docu- 
ments relating to the Colonial History of New York" reduce the 
number by several hundred, and Edward Eggleston, who 
has lately been making researches in the British Museum on the 
subject, writes me that "in the manuscript report of the Board 
of Trade and Plantations, dated 1721, the number of Palatines 
settled contiguous to Hudson's river is set down at twenty-two 
hundred and twenty-seven." It is knoT\Ti that over four hun- 
dred died during the voyage. From one hundred and fifty to 
two hundred, mostly widows and sick persons, remained 
in New York city, and the orphans, amounting to almost as 
many more, were apprenticed by Governor Hunter in New York 
and New Jersey. Among the poor widows was Johanna Zen- 
ger, with three children, one of whom, John Peter, at that time, 
thirteen years old, was bound to William Bradford, printer. 
His, it was, whose trial for libel, in 1734, was a cause celebre in 
the early legal history of the city of New York. 

The manufacture of turpentine and naval stores did not prove 
a successful undertaking. During the two years necessary to 
await the result of their labors, the Germans grew dissatisfied; 
they complained of ill-treatment, and especially of the bad char- 
acter of the provisions supplied by Livingston, the government 
inspector and contractor. Growing insubordinate. Governor 
Hunter attempted coercion, which but widened the breach ; 
many wandered off seeking new homes, and, in the autumn and 
spring of 1712-13, seven hundred deserted the Hudson, and, 
making their way sixty miles northwest, settled in one of the 
fertile valleys of Schoharie county. Owing to ignorance regard- 
ing land-tenure, and the carelessness with which they had taken 
up their individual holdings, much suffering was eventually caused 
these migrators by the discovery that the titles to many of their 
properties were invalid. After nearly ten years of harassing 
litigations and contests, one half the settlers for a third time moved. 



German Grievances Against New York. 47 

on, floating down the Susquehanna river for three hundred miles, 
and finally finding homes under the friendly government of 
Pennsylvania. Palatine Bridge and township, in Montgomery- 
County, New York, indicate the point to which a second portion 
of these Schoharie Germans removed, and a third contingent 
settled in Herkimer county, at a place since known as the Ger- 
man Flats. 

The Livingston Manor immigrants always felt that they had 
great cause for grievance against the authorities of the province 
of New York. Whether they were right or not, it is at this late 
day difiicult to determine, but there is no doubt that the exist- 
ence of such feeling resulted in after years to the great advan- 
tage of Pennsylvania. Peter Kalm, a Swedish naturalist, who 
travelled in America in 1748, remarked on the populousness of 
Pennsylvania, and that the province of New York had much 
fewer inhabitants. He explains that fact in the following man- 
ner : — "In the reign of Queen Anne, about the year 1709, many- 
Germans came hither, who got a tract of land from the English 
government which they might settle. After they had lived there 
some time, and had built houses, and made cornfields and mead- 
ows, under several pretences they were repeatedly deprived of 
parts of their land. They returned violence for violence and 
beat those who thus robbed them of their possessions. The most 
active people among the Germans being taken up, they were 
roughly treated and punished with the utmost vigor of the law. 
This, however, so far exasperated the rest that the greater part 
of them left their houses and fields and went to settle in Pennsyl- 
vania. There they were exceeding well received, got a consid- 
erable tract of land and were indulged in great privileges, which 
were given them forever. The Germans, not satisfied with 
being themselves removed from New York, wrote to their rela- 
tions and friends and advised them, if ever they intended to 
come to America, not to go to New York, where the government 
had shown itself so inequitable. This advice had such influence 
that the Germans, who afterwards went in great numbers to 
North America, constantly avoided New York and always went 
to Pennsylvania. It sometimes happened that they were forced 
to go on board such ships as were bound for New York, but 
they were scarce got on shore, when they hastened to Pennsyl- 
vania, in sight of all the inhabitants of New York." 



48 The Story of an Old Farm. 

By this time the fever for emigration was deeply seated in 
Germany. Ship after ship sailed up the Delaware from over the 
seas, black with Palatines, Hanoverians, Saxons, and Austrian and 
Swiss Germans. Spreading over the present counties of York, 
Lancaster, Berks, Adams, Montgomery and Northampton, they 
soon made their industrious presence known by the innumerable 
houses of logs that fastened themselves to the sloping sides of 
the valleys, and by the shrinking back of the forests from the 
patches of well-tilled clearings that began to mosaic the Pennsyl- 
vania wildernesses. They brought with them their axes, mat- 
tocks and mauls, and land that had lain for ages under the dark 
canopy of the trees, fattening on the richness of decaying leaves 
and vegetation, was opened to the warm sunlight, until acres of 
forest were converted into arable fields, smiling with the results 
of well-directed labor. It was not that province alone which bene- 
fited by the spirit of unrest that had seized upon Europeans. 
Maine, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi and Louis- 
iana received accessions to their populations by the arrival of 
emigrants. Gayarre, the historian of the last state, says that 
some of Louisiana's best citizens and wealthiest sugar-planters 
have sprung from a little colony of three hundred poor Germans 
who settled on the river, thirty or forty miles above New 
Orleans, in 1722. But it was toward Pennsylvania that the 
great tide of emigration steadily set. By 1717 such vast num- 
bers were arriving as to cause much uneasiness to some of the 
early English settlers in the province. The governor's council 
in that year made note of the fact that it might be a very dan- 
gerous consequence, having so many foreigners from Germany 
daily disposing of themselves, without producing certificates 
from where they came, or what they were, and without making 
application to any of the magistrates. This led to measures 
being taken whereby all arriving immigrants were obliged to be 
registered by the secretary of the province. In that way, over 
thirty thousand names of the later foreign arrivals are pre- 
served, and on file at the state house in Harrisburg. This unnec- 
essary fear of the German influx did not prove of long duration. 
We find the royal governor saying, in 1738, ''This province has 
been for some years the asylum of the distressed Protestants of 
the Palatinate and other parts of Germany ; and, I believe, it 



Arrivals in Pennsylvania before the Revolution. 49 

may truthfully be said that the present flourishing condition of it 
is in a great measure owing to the industry of those people." 

Pennsylvania continued, up to the time of the Revolution, to be 
the objective point for German emigrants. Ships, brigantines, 
scows, pinks and bilanders, mostly English bottoms, plied with 
great regularity between the Maas and the Delaware, transport- 
ing the Palatines, as they seem to have become historically 
known, from Rotterdam to Philadelphia. The vessels were 
small and the voyages prolonged, but the frequency with which 
the same craft — as shown by the records — entered the capes of 
the Delaware, implied a traffic partaking somewhat of the char- 
acter of a ferry. For, year after year, the ships '' St. Andrew," 
" Phoenix," " Dragon," " Patience," " Mortonhouse," '' Pennsyl- 
vania," ''Two Brothers," "Nancy," and many others, discharged 
their human cargoes at Philadelphia^ the average passenger-list 
embracing one hundred and fifty souls. In the year 1719 some 
six thousand are said to have landed, and Proud avers that in 
the year 1749 twelve thousand Germans arrived in the province. 
Sypher claims that prior to 1727 fifty thousand people, mostly 
from the Rhine country, had emigrated to the Quaker colony. 
In 1766 Benjamin Franklin testified before a committee of the 
House of Commons that he supposed that there were in Pennsyl- 
vania about one hundred and sixty thousand white inhabitants, of 
whom one-third were Quakers and one-third Germans. 

And so it was that each twelve months saw the population of 
the province much increased and enriched by a people who 
brought with them the greatest of all wealth, industry and integ- 
rity, and characters that had been superpoised and developed by 
years of suffering and persecution. 



CHAPTER V. 

Johannes Moclich Beaches Pennsylvania in 17 85 — His Experi- 
ences in Philadelphia and Germantown. 

In early colonial days King, now Water, street, in Philadelphia, 
lay close to the edge of the Delaware. A low, one-storey, ram- 
bling tavern-house stood fronting it, near the corner of Chestnut, 
its creaking sign bearing in dull paint the legend of a crooked 
stick of wood. It was here that Benjamin Franklin ate his first 
dinner in the Quaker City. This inn gave to the short dock 
facing it the name of the Crooked Billet Wharf, often mentioned 
in old-time Philadelphia annals. Any one loitering on this dock 
on the morning of the twenty-ninth of May, 1735, could have 
heard the splash of a right-bower, and the rattle of an anchor 
chain — but hold ! a historian is privileged to be prosy but never to 
be untrue — nearly seventy-five years must elapse before a Phila- 
delphian, or any one else, will hear the musical clank of a paying- 
out cable, and in the meantime many a stout ship will drift to its 
destruction on the rocks, because of its hawser being cut by sub- 
merged ledges. Well ! the loiterer would at least have heard 
the splash of the anchor, and, on looking up, discovered the ship 
" Mercury," Captain William Wilson, from Rotterdam, swinging 
round to the tide. As she lies in the stream the vessel shows 
repeated marks of her weeks of battling with the fierce waves 
of the Atlantic, and her sides are streaked by the salt spray of 
many a weary gale. 

The log of this ship has not been preserved, so we know noth- 
ing of the particulars of her voyage or of the date of sailing. She 
was without doubt a small vessel, and many days must have 
elapsed since the yellow arms of Dutch wind-mills had waved 
farewells to her passengers from behind the dunes of the low Hoi- 



The "Mercukt" and the Passengers. 51 

land coast. Something may be learned of the time usually occu- 
pied in such a voyage from a German MS. in the library of the 
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which i-ecounts the incidents 
in the journey of David Sholtze and eighteen associate Schwenck- 
felders. They set sail from Rotterdam on the twenty-fourth of 
June, 1733, on the brigantine '^ Pennsylvania Merchant," Cap- 
tain John Stedman. The journal of these Germans tells of but 
little save head winds, seasickness, and the occasional death of an 
emigrant. The first occurred on the eleventh of July, and an 
account is given of the body being sewn in a sack, weighted 
with sand, and dropped by the sailors into the sea, the passengers 
singing the hymn, '■'■Nun lasset uns den Leib hegraben." The ship 
rested for seven days in the harbor of Plymouth, and on the 
twenty-eighth of September reached Philadelphia. It is fair to 
presume that the '^ Mercury's " passage was of equal length, and 
that it was yet February when she spread her canvas at the 
mouth of Maas, and made her first bow to the rollers of the 
North Sea. 

Among the one hundred and eighty-six sun-burned, weather- 
beaten Germans and Swiss who leaned over her taflfrail, looking 
with curious eyes upon the little entry port of Pennsylvania, was 
Johannes Moelich and his family. The aspect of this provincial 
town in its setting of dark forests must have presented a strong 
contrast to the animated quays, and the spires, belfries, lofty 
pinnacled houses and dark windmills of the quaint old city from 
which he had embarked. It would be pleasant to be able to 
narrate Johannes' impressions and experiences on landing. Had 
he known that one hundred and fifty years later many of his 
posterity would have been glad to read of his movements in 
Philadelphia, he doubtless would have kept a faithful journal. 
In the absence of such forethought on his part we must draw 
upon our knowledge of the Quaker City in those early days, 
and, with the help of Watson, that delightfully garrulous Boswell 
of old Philadelphia, we shall be able to see with Johannes' eyes 
as he and his family make their way up into the city. 

It was now over fifty years since the little ship '' Welcome," of 
only three hundred tons burthen, had landed William Penn in 
Pennsylvania, and its capital bad grown in population to some 
eight thousand souls, among whom were 1,621 taxables and 



52 The Stoky of an Old Farm. 

1,097 voters. Thomas Lawrence was mayor, Philadelphia hav- 
ing been a chartered city since 1701. It was a compact little 
town of about one thousand houses, nearly all of brick, one and 
two storeys high, with double-hipped roofs, although occasionally 
a more pretentious dwelling elevated its dormers above a third 
storey. The area was not very extensive; a very short walk 
would bring one to the outlying commons and woods. Beyond 
Fourth street the houses were but scattering ; of course 
there were no pavements, and westerly there were no streets 
marked out beyond Seventh. The highway leading out of town 
followed the line of High, now Market, street, and after crossing 
the location of the present Eighth street, the forest commenced, 
and extended to the Schuylkill. 

Did you ask was there any one to welcome Johannes? Though 
no message from below had announced the coming of the " Mer- 
cury, " without doubt the arrival of the ship was soon noised 
through the city ; let us hope that the immigrant was expected 
and that when he landed on the Crooked Billet Wharf he found 
awaiting him some warm-hearted compatriot, who seized his hand 
and bade him a hearty welcome to America. In fancy, at least, 
we will picture him so greeted. We have already learned 
that his younger brother, Johan Peter, had reached Philadel- 
phia in the ship " Mortonhouse," Captain John Coultas, on 
the twenty-fourth of August, 1728. Perhaps he was among 
those who thronged the wharf on this May moniing. In all 
the thirty thousand names of foreigners preserved in the 
Pennsylvania archives as reaching that province between 
the years 1727 and 1776, those of Johannes' family and that 
of Johan Peter are the only Moelichs that appear. 

We will constitute ourselves one of the party as they leave the 
wharf and make their way along Water street, the children hang- 
ing back to look into the shop windows, for in the year 1735 
that street was the centre of the retail trade of the city. They are 
going to the State House to fultil the iirst duty of all newly 
arrived foreigners, the registering of their names with the secre- 
tary of the province. What is more delightful than the first few 
hours spent in a new country, where everything is totally differ- 
ent from one's ordinary surroundings ? Weeks of pleasur- 
able experiences may be passed later, but the peculiar charm 



First Impressions of the Quaker City. 53 

of the first uproUing of the curtain will never return. Though 
their own country had been rich in the picturesque, the Moelichs 
found much to excite both interest and wonder, and in the short 
time occupied in reaching the State House they received many 
new and strange impressions. An American on visiting England 
or the Continent for the first time finds himself attacked by a 
strange illusion. As he feels himself surrounded by an atmos- 
phere of hoar antiquity, while wandering from one ancient town 
to another, his whole nature saturated with the charm of quaint 
architecture and picturesque efi'ects, imperceptibly there 
steals over him a faint impression of a prior acquaintance, 
as if revisiting scenes familiar in some previous existence ; and 
he finds himself almost doubting that the retina of the eye is 
actually receiving the impression of a picture seen for the first 
time. He recognizes the illusion and fully appreciates that what 
he sees is really new because not viewed before — he recognizes^ 
also, that to him, at least, it is truly old and familiar ; old in a 
thousand impressions and desires, born of books and the talk of 
travellers, consequently, he is rarely if ever confronted by the 
entirely unexpected. Johannes and his party were not troubled 
by this double vision. They had read no books descriptive of 
America, nor had they listened to the oft-told tales of returned 
travellers. To them all the panorama of the Quaker City exis- 
tence was novel and interesting. Probably the life of the streets 
afi'ected them as the most peculiarly foreign and odd — indeed, 
not only the Germans were so impressed for we, who have 
attached ourselves unbidden to this little party, find no less cause 
for wonder at the strange sights of these provincial thorough- 
fares. Proceeding westward along Chestnut street they are met 
by such a procession as has never been seen on the highways of 
Europe ; a drove of negroes, coupled two by two, recently 
imported from the Guinea coast, and probably just landed from 
Barbadoes, which at that time was the distributing mart of the 
English slave trade. On reaching the next corner there was to 
be seen an even sadder phase of this barbarous institution. In 
front of a tavern, from a rude platform resting on two upright 
hogsheads, was being held a slave auction. '' Likely negro boys '^ 
and " breeding wenches," as the placarded bills announced, were 
being knocked down at a few hundred dollars a head, for. as 



54 The Story of an Old Farm. 

importing at that time was brisk, slaves did not approach in value 
to those of our ante-bellum days. 

As the Moelichs walked along the street the bordering, detached 
houses had a kindly, domestic presence, due to their comely little 
porches with pent-house roofs shading wooden seats, seemingly 
extending to the passer-by a hospitable invitation to tarry. This air 
of hospitality was further enhanced by the attractive balconies 
that faced even the smaller dwellings, on which their occupants 
were wont to gather to enjoy the air at the cool of the day. Occa- 
sional glimpses of quaint interiors were obtained, through open 
windows that swung on hinges inward, with small panes of glass 
set in their leaden-framed lattices. In some of the finer houses the 
best rooms were wainscoated in oak and red cedar, but in most 
instances the walls were plainly whitewashed. No carpets were 
to be seen, the floors being covered with silver sand drawn into 
fanciful figures by a skillful use of the sweeping brush, in which 
the housekeepers took much pride. Lofty chests of drawers, with 
round black balls for legs, extended nearly to the ceiling, and all 
the family china was to be seen through the diamond lights of 
odd little corner cupboards. On the massive Dutch dresser were 
displayed brightly polished porringers and platters of pewter, the 
dinner plates of that day being nearly altogether of that metal, 
though the use of wooden trenchers was not entirely out of date. 
Sometimes, through farther doors opening into the kitchen, our 
party was much amused at the sight of a peculiar feature of house- 
hold economy. Before cavernous fire-places, often girt with ancient 
Dutch tiles, were set baking-ovens, whose spits were turned by 
little bow-legged dogs trained to run in a hollow cylinder, like a 
squirrel, by which means was the roasting meat kept revolving. 
'^ Mine host " Clark, of the State House Inn, advertises about 
this time in Andrew Bradford's weekly " Mercury," and in Ben- 
jamin Franklin's " Pennsylvania Gazette," that '' he has for sale 
several dogs and wheels, much preferable to any jacks for roast- 
ing any joints of meat." 

But what means this turmoil and uproar, and from whence 
comes this advancing crowd, enveloped in dust ? Johannes' 
•party quickly leaves the street and takes to a little foot-path 
that runs diagonally from the corner of Third to High and 
Fourth streets. Standing there, they see surge by an unfragrant 



A Parade of Evil-Doers. 55 

rabble, in the centre of which, tied to the tail of a cart, a poor 
wretch is bellowing with pain, as stroke after stroke from a con- 
stable's whip falls on his naked back. The Germans look 
stolidly on the scene ; they are too familiar with despotic punish- 
ments to be surprised or affected thereby, but their accompany- 
ing ghostly posterity — meaning you and me, reader, — find it an 
inhuman spectacle. Following the cart are a number of petty 
criminals surrounded by constables. It is the weekly market day 
parade of evil-doers. After their tour of the city, and their suf- 
fering from the turbulence of the ribald torrent of the populace, 
they will drift into no quiet eddy within the seclusion of the jail. 
They must take their places on the pillory and in the stocks that 
have been set up for their reception, opposite the prison on 
High and Third streets. This day addled eggs will sell as well 
aii those freshly laid, for many a passer-by of this rough age 
will deem it a virtuous action to have a fling at the culprits, for 
th? pleasure of seeing them dodge their heads in the endeavor 
to avoid the noxious missiles. Benjamin Franklin, in his "Auto- 
biography," says that the position of a Philadelphia constable was 
at that time one of a considerable profit. The management of 
the city-watch was in their hands. It was the duty of the officer 
of each ward to summon a certain number of resident household- 
ers to attend him each night to aid in patrolling his district. 
This service could be avoided by paying six shillings, which 
was supposed to go to hiring substitutes. The number who 
paid for the exemption was much greater than those hired by 
the constables to walk the rounds, consequently the officers put 
much unlawful money in their pockets. This system resulted 
in the night-watches being largely composed of irresponsible 
persons who undertook the duties for a little drink-money, but 
quite neglected to fulfil their obligations. Evidently that time 
was no more the golden age of municipal purity than is the 
present. 

Retiming to Chestnut street our party, rambling on, is soon 
in frorit of that noted structure which the events of later years 
baptizsd as Independence Hall. The Philadelphian of the pres- 
ent day, who halts for a moment in the sturdy presence of this 
time-honored, historic building, looks with veneration on its 
homely fa9ade. To him it bears amid the surrounding turmoil 



56 The Story of an Old Farm. 

a dignified expression of peace and rest, as if emanating from 
the consciousness of a deserved repose, after a great work, noblj 
performed. Very different the aspect it presented to the newly- 
arrived Germans. No throbbing tide of humanity ebbed and 
flowed beneath its shadows; Chestnut street, not yet the artery 
of a great city, did not pulsate at its portals. At this distance out 
it was but little better than a country road, and the State House, 
just completed, faced it square and prim, bright, from lintel to 
roof-tree, with red bricks, fresh paint and white mortar. There 
was then no beautiful park as a rich setting; the unkempt 
grounds extended but half across the square, and several small 
detached brick dwellings fronted Walnut street, at its rear. 

Upon the original book of record in the Department of State 
of Pennsylvania, there is still to be seen the signature made by 
Johannes on that day; it is evidently the writing of a man of 
intelligence, as it is not only legibly inscribed, but would stand 
as an example of good penmanship. Most of the arrivals by the 
same vessel, being unable to write, made their marks. The 
names are preceded by the following entry : 

At the Court House, Pliiladelphia, present, the Honorable Patrick Go'don, 
Esq., Lieutenant-Govornor Thomas Lawrence and Charles Read, Esquires. The 
Palatines, whose names are underwritten, imported in the ship Mercury of Lon- 
don, William Wilson, master, Rotterdam, but last from Cowes, did this day sub- 
scribe the oaths to the Government, May 29, 1735. 

The grounds about the State House, on this May moraing, 
framed an interesting picture. Johannes, on leaving the build- 
ing, after registering, was a good deal surprised by the sight 
of an encampment of Indians, who happened that day to have 
taken possession of the open space. For a long time after 
this, it was the practice of bands of red-men to occasionally make 
excursions to the city for the purpose of purchase and barter. 
Generally they would remain for a week or more, and it was. 
their custom to establish themselves, with their squaws and chil- 
dren, in the State House yard. While the young bucks roamed 
about the streets, shooting coins off posts with their arrows, and 
visiting the stores for trade, the squaws and old men occupied 
themselves in camp by making and selling plaited baskets, 
beaded moccasins and porcupine-quill work. The aborigines of 
this portion of the British colonies were known as ''Delawares,'^ 



Resting at the Indian-King Tavern. 57 

because first found in the vicinity of that river, though they 
called themselves Lenni-Lenape, which means "The original 
people." The great mass of this tribe, or clan, had moved 
toward the setting sun in the year 1728, but at this time there 
remained several thousand in Pennsylvania, who were much dis- 
satisfied with the sale of their lands ; a discontent which was 
greatly increased, a few years later, by what was known as the 
"Walking Treaty," they claiming to have been swindled by the 
English in the great area of territory acquired by the Europeans 
in that famous bargain. It was not tiU ten or fifteen years later 
that the Pennsylvanians, by calling to their aid the Six Nations 
of the North, induced these remaining Indians to depart for the 
"Sweet Waters of the West." 

Again we find ourselves deploring the fact that Johannes neg- 
lected his journal. Where did he go on leaving the State 
House ? After so long a voyage he must have desired to stretch 
his legs by a more extended walk, but, perhaps, Mariah Katrina 
and the children were not so eager for exercise. We will sup- 
pose that he established them comfortably at the Indian-king 
tavern on High street, where, before sallying out for a prowl 
about the city, he refreshed himself with his first glass of West- 
India rum, at that time the only liquor imported in quantity into 
the colony ; or with a foaming tankard of ale, which was then in 
such common use that most dwellings had small brew-houses 
connected with their kitchens. Johannes could not have been 
put to a very great expense at the tavern, as only modest charges 
for board and lodging were known in those early days. Profes- 
sor Kalm, the Swedish botanist, narrates in his account of his 
travels that, when in Philadelphia, in 1728, he lodged with a 
Quaker where he met many honest people. "I and ray Yung- 
straem, the companion of my voyage, had a room, candles, beds, 
attendance and three meals a day for twenty shillings per week 
in Pennsylvania currency." Two dollars and eighty-eight cents. 

On leaving the tavern, Johannes' friends carried him to see 
Christ Church, then just completing, and, after the State House, 
at once both the pride and the wonder of the people. It reared 
its impressive bulk on an open square, adjoining a pond which 
reached from Arch to High streets, once a noted place for shoot- 
ing ducks. This, then considered, lofty architectural pile 



58 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

appeared much as at the present day, though wanting its grace- 
ful spire — that, came seventeen years later as the result of a lot- 
tery. It lacked more than a spire ; it was new, and however 
grand a new church edifice may be, until it has been consecrated 
by years of service, it does not seem entitled to that hallowed 
reverence, born of old associations and decades of prayer and 
praise, that, involuntarily, an ancient temple evokes from its 
worshipers. Though, at the present day, this church is with- 
out many of its original quaint characteristics, such as the high- 
backed slips, bedroom pews and brick-paved aisles, their loss is 
more than compensated for by the acquisition of that mellow 
atmosphere of age, with which kindly time has enveloped the 
building's antique walls and gables, until it appears as venerable 
as the steadfast hills. 

Of course the mysterious friend, with whom we have gener- 
ously supplied Johannes, insists upon a pilgrimage to the house 
of William Penn at Second street and Morris' alley ; for that is 
a shrine at which newly-arrived foreigners earliest worshiped. 
Penn's reputation was as a cherished heritage to all oppressed 
Europeans, and his memory, as the father of Pennsylvanian 
immigration, was especially revered by the Grerman heart. 
As our visitors strolled in that direction, the streets were 
enlivened by numerous and varied odd costumes. It seemed 
very singular to meet so many long-drawn Quakers, mov- 
ing at measured pace with solemn visage, clad in lengthy 
shad-breasted drab coats adorned with horn buttons, their flap- 
ping waistcoats extending far down over the small-clothes that 
covered their sober strides. The long, straight hair of these 
peripatetic monuments of sedateness was covered by broad-brim- 
med felt hats, looped at the side with strings. These Quakers 
offered an excellent foil to the brilliantly-arrayed, young gallants, 
"who tripped jauntily by, under gold-laced cocked-hats, with their 
gaily embroidered coats cut low at the neck behind, that the 
great silver buckles fastening their plaited stocks might be dis- 
played. In that picturesque period it was the fashion for young 
gentlemen to wear short, straight, steel rapiers, often with jewelled 
hilts, which gave them quite a martial appearance, though not 
altogether in keeping with their clocked silk stockings, paste- 
buckled shoes and ruffled wrists and throats. 



Street Scenes and Colonial Costumes. 59 

Gay apparel was not confined by any means to the younger 
nien. Old gentlemen, met on the way, were frequently 
resplendent in plush breeches, vests of various hues, and skirts stif- 
fened with buckram till they stood out at an angle. Often 
double rows of solid silver buttons extended down their coats, 
and it was not uncommon to see suits decorated with conch- 
shells set in silver. A brilliant sight they presented in all the 
glint of polished metal, as they stamped along, shaking their 
powdered wigs, striking the pavement with their long silver- 
headed canes, stopping occasionally to greet some old friend and 
extend a pinch of snuff, not so much because of generous procliv- 
ities, as the desire to display their chased silver and gold snuff- 
boxes, which were generally carried in the hand. The kaleidos- 
copic changes of colors, to be noted among the people thronging 
the streets this bright May day, were not all to be attributed to 
the well-to-do of the populace: body-servants contributed their 
full share to the brilliant hues of the colonial costumes, and as 
they minced over the pavements at a respectful distance behind 
their masters and mistresses, often presented a gorgeous appear- 
ance. An absconding one is described in an advertisement of 
that year as wearing damask breeches, copper-colored cloth coat 
trimmed with black, and black stockings. A barber's servant, 
who ran away a few years before that time, wore, according to 
the notice in the "Weekly Mercury," a light wig, a gray kersey 
jacket lined with blue, a white vest faced and lined with red, 
and having yellow buttons, a pair of drugget breeches, a pair of 
black stockings and a red leathern apron. The last feature of 
his dress, his apron of leather, was at that time a distinguishing 
badge of servitude ; they being worn not only by workingmen, 
but by all apprentices, clerks, and employees of store and shop- 
keepers. It was also the custom for the wives and daughters of 
tradesmen, who assisted them in the business, to wear short 
skirts of green baize. 

On reaching Penn's house, it was found to be a sturdy edifice 
with bastions and salient angles. Its flanking gables fronted on 
the street, but the main portion of the building set well back, so 
that the house faced three sides of a small court. At the rear 
were beautifully shaded gardens, extending half-way to Front 
street and nearly to Wahiut street. This edifice was built in the 



60 The Story of an Old Farm. 

earliest days of the city by one of its greatest improvers, Samuel 
Carpenter, and it was fitted up for Penn's occupancy on the occa- 
sion of his second coming to America. Penn brought with him 
his family and household gods, expecting to make his home 
permanently in Pennsylvania ; but within two years after taking 
possession of this mansion, owing to the distaste of his wife for 
colonial life, and owing to the fact that his enemies in London 
were dangerously threatening his powers and rights in America, 
he was forced to return to England. It was thought his absence 
would be temporary, but his affairs becoming more and more 
involved, he fretted away year after year in a vain endeavor to 
return, until he finally died, in 1718, without again visiting his 
colonial possessions. In 1704 Samuel Carpenter sold this house 
to William Trent for eight hundred and fifty pounds. This was 
the same Trent, who, in 1719, established mills on the Delaware, 
thus founding Trent-town — now Trenton. He died there, in 
1724, as Chief Justice of New Jersey. Penn's mansion ulti- 
mately became, and continued to be until many years after the 
Revolution, a fashionable boarding-house. From there was car- 
ried, in 3 782, the body of the eccentric General Charles Lee, 
which was interred in Christ Churchyard. 

Our German friends, while wandering around the town visit- 
ing its many points of interest, probably found their way to 
another spot associated with the founder of the colony — the Blue 
Anchor Tavern, on the corner of Second and Dock streets, it 
being the first house he entered on reaching the city. Penn 
arrived at Newcastle by the ship " Welcome," in October, 1683. 
After spending a little time there, and at Chester, he proceeded 
to Philadelphia, landing at a low sandy beach fronting this tav- 
ern, at the mouth of Dock Creek, which, at that time, had grassy 
banks and rural surroundings. Tradition designates this inn, 
then just completing, as being the first substantial house erected 
in the city. For many years it was the point at which landings 
were made from small vessels trafficking with New Jersey and 
New England. It was also used as a ferry-house by persons 
crossing to Society Hill, to the New Jersey shore, and to Wind- 
mill Island, where a Dutch-looking structure ground the grain 
of the early settlers. 

Meanwhile, the day is wearing on, and the Moelichs have 



Philadelphia Equipage in 1735. 61 

still a journey before them, for it is not to be supposed that newly 
arrived Germans will remain in Philadelphia when but a few 
miles beyond is a thriving settlement, composed entirely of their 
own countrymen. The good Pastorius, the faithful pastor, magis- 
trate, teacher, patriarch, and friend of Teuton folk, had died fif- 
teen years before, but he left behind him, at Germantown, seven 
miles away as the road then ran, a sturdy German community, 
and a firmly established Lutheran church. It was the pole 
toward which the needles of all Rhenish emigrants turned, and 
we must conceive of some means of transporting Johannes and 
his party to that prosperous place. The human imagination is 
quite capable of bridging centuries and of creating situations, so 
there is no reason why we should not be equal to this task, 
especially as we feel confident of the assistance of Thomas Skel- 
ton, who advertises in the " Gazette " that he has " a four- 
wheeled chaise, in Chestnut street, to be hired." This was the 
only public conveyance in the city. It was twenty-five years 
later before Jacob Coleman began running the first stage — 
" with an awning " — from Philadelphia to the King of Prussia 
Inn, at Germantown. 

In 1735 the city boasted of but eight four-wheeled coaches, 
one of which belonged to Deputy-Governor Gordon. The 
streets were singularly clear of vehicles of every description. 
There were but six four-wheeled, one-seated chaises, drawn 
by two horses, besides the one that Shelton had to hire. The 
few carriages, if they could be so called, to be seen were two- 
wheeled, one-horse chairs, a cheap sort of a gig with a plain 
painted body, ornamented with brass rings and buckles, 
resting on leathern bands, for springs. The general means of 
conveyance, both for goods and people, was by horses ; farmers' 
wives came to town on pillions, behind their husbands, and stout 
market-women rode in from Germantown, panniers, filled with 
produce, flanking their horses' sides. Much of the freighting of 
the province was done by pack-horses, and it was a common sight 
to see a long line of them entering Philadelphia, laden with all 
manner of merchandise — some so enveloped in fodder as to leave 
exposed only their noses and hoofs, others bearing heavy casks 
suspended on either side, whilst still others staggered along 
beneath the weight of bars of iron, bent so to hang as to escape 



62 The Story of an Old Farm. 

the bordering trees of the contracted trails and roadways. There 
were but few carts ; the man who brought the silver sand to the 
different doors each morning owned one ; and we have seen to 
what base purpose another has been put hy the town constable. 
That peculiar Pennsylvania institution, the big blue-bodied 
wagon, had not yet made its appearance, though it was not 
many years before the prosperity of the province was such as to 
result in every farmer having his wagon. Their first introduc- 
tion caused great indignation among the owners of pack-horses, 
who feared that their business would be ruined. In 1755, when 
Postmaster-Greneral Franklin found Braddock fretting and fum- 
ing at Frederick, in Maryland, because his contractors had failed 
to provide means of transportation, he at once agreed to furnish 
one hundred and fifty wagons, with four-horse teams, from Penn- 
sylvania, and have them at Will's Creek within ten days. 
Franklin fulfilled his agreement, and thus was Braddock's army 
enabled to move on to its disastrous overthrow. 

We will impress one of the carts into the service of aiding 
Thomas Skelton in moving our party. Johannes must return 
on some other day for his heavy luggage and furniture, as the 
" Mercury " will hardly as yet have commenced discharging 
from her hold. The Germantown road left town at the upper 
end of Front street, and, after following the river for a short dis- 
tance, wound in a northwesterly direction, and plunged into a 
dense forest, the haunt then, as it had been for centuries, of bears, 
wolves, deer and wild turkeys. The wolves seemed to have 
proved the most annoying to citizens, as we find bounties for their 
extirpation offered for many years after. The highway was not 
much more than a trail, the branches of the giant trees, that 
steed in solid phalanxes close to the wheel tracks, forming over 
the travellers' heads a roof of impenetrable foliage. Occasion- 
ally the shade was broken by the sunshine of a clearing, in the 
centre of which stood a log house, having a long sloping roof of 
thatch — the harbinger of the future greatness of suburban 
Philadelphia. Some of the clearings were already green 
meadows, in which no sign of trees appeared; others were 
studded by stumps showing the recent marks of the pioneer's 
axe. On nearing Germantown the road traversed a swamp, the 
wheels of the cart and chaise jolting over the rough logs of the 
corduroy road-bed that made the bog passable. 



Johannes Reaches Germantown. 63^ 

Our friends, listening to the tales of their guides, as they 
moved slowly through the woods, must have been filled with the 
most agreeable anticipations, on approaching the end of their 
journey. They found Germantown to be as thoroughly German, 
in language and in the appearance of the people, as any of the 
villages they had left, perched on the picturesque banks of the 
river of the Schoppen in the mother country. With its one 
long street bordered by straggling houses, it still presented much 
of the aspect of a frontier settlement. Many of the dwellings were 
the primitive structures of the early comers. They were built 
of logs, the interstices filled in with river-rushes and clay, and 
covered with a thin coat of plaster ; their gables confroiited the- 
street, and a man of ordinary size could easily touch the eaves, 
of their double-hipped roofs. The more modern houses were- 
of dark glimmer-stone, with little windows set deep in the thick 
walls, and with huge chimneys rising at the corners. These low 
substantial buildings, with their steep roofs and protecting eaves, 
were planted well back from the highway, and surrounded by 
fruit-trees. The comfortably -rotund matrons of these dwellings, 
who looked out at the new arrivals from the open upper half of 
their Dutch doors, were all busily knitting, for these Germantown 
housewives had already acquired an inter-colonial reputation as 
the manufacturers of superior stockings. 

The first German newspaper in Pennsylvania, and the first in 
America printed in a foreign language, was issued in German- 
town the year of Johannes' arrival. This place retained all its 
German characteristics down to the year 1793. Until that date 
all the public preaching was in German ; it was the language of 
business and society, and even that of the boys playing in the 
streets. The outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia, in the 
year '93, caused the offices of the general and state govern- 
ments, and of the city banks, to remove to this suburban town. 
This introduced an English speaking element, and a population, 
which proved to be, in part, permanent. Germantown thus 
becoming favorably known to Philadelphians, rapidly increased 
the number of its English speaking people. 

And now we must bid Johannes a many years' farewell — here 
he and his family fade for a time from our sight and knowledge. 
By the aid of a lively fancy, we have been able, for one day, to 



64 The Story of an Old Farm. 

clothe him with all the attributes of existence and experiences, 
but to continue that for a decade would be to tax the powers of 
your scribe beyond his capabilities. Family tradition asserts 
that he remained in the vicinity of Philadelphia for ten years. 
We will leave him there to acquire the language, educate his 
children, rub off his foreign characteristics, and gradually to 
assimilate himself and his family with the manners and customs 
of the people of the new country of his adoption. Our next 
knowledge of his life is from the pages of a letter he received 
from Bendorf in the year 1745. That interesting communica- 
tion will be presented in the coming chapter. 




CHAPTER VI. 

Letters from the Old Country — Bendorf Comes under the 
Dominion of the Murdering Margrave of Anspach. 

It is before me as I write — this old letter — a little torn in 
places, and tanned by time to the color of old gold; yet, in a 
good state of preservation, and the penmanship almost like copy- 
plate in excellence. Its writer, Johannes Georg Hager, was an 
" Evangelical Prseceptor," (teacher of a Latin school), and clerk 
of the Bendorf church ; such a person in a German village 
being second only to the pastor and burgomaster. The parish 
register, in speaking of his death, in 1775, in his sixty-first year, 
records that he had been active for thirty-four years in his 
church and school duties. This letter served as his first intro- 
duction to Johannes' immediate family, as, in 1744, the preceptor 
had married Magdalena Christina Catharina Antonetta, the 
twenty-year-old daughter of Georg Peter Otto, whose wife, Ver- 
onica Gerdrutta, was the sister of Mariah Katrina. The com- 
munication is interesting, not only on account of the news it gives of 
the middle of the last century, but because of the piety evinced 
in its solemn invocation and benediction, and also as showing the 
stately and courteous style of writing at that time. 



Corner 
torn off. 



Bendorff, June, 1745. 
Mr. cousin 
AND Lady 

CHILDREN. 

— dear friend with all my heart sympathy [torn] all wish extraordinary joy by the 
long [torn] expected wish from the foundation of [torn] the heart that the Almighty 
[torn] continually bless you also for the future and all your acts [torn] and that 
although in a foreign country our friendship may get cultivated and grow 
stronger, for the sake of Jesus Christ, Amen ! You may perhaps think what 
a new cousin 1 may be, wherefore I commence by informing you tliat after the 
5 



66 The Story of an Old Farm. 

death of Mr. [torn] pold in 1742 I was called here as preceptor and was mar- 
ried last Fall, 1744, with Magdalena Catharina, the only danjjhter of your 
brother-in-law, Otto, which accounts for our new relationship. To our all deso- 
lation our Lord has taken from us in 1741 my mother-in-law, in consequence of 
a fever — the same sickness which caused the death of young Mrs. Giegmann and 
many others, [torn] On 31 Jan., we had a calamity here as you will per- 
haps he aware already, whereby 75 houses were burned down. The fire com- 
menced at the Forsten house, near the Steingate, but how it originated has not 
been ascertained, so far, and from there everything burned down to the Herrschaft& 
Keller House, touching also my school house ; the principal street burned down 
as far as Ca'sar's house, and on the other side down to the pastor's house. So that 
between the Stein-gate and the Bach-gate there was not a single building remain- 
ing, and as you are acquainted yet with the locality you may judge for your- 
selves who are the people who are burned out, and if you had been present yet you 
would have been a sufferer too. The misery was terrible for these poor people, to see 
their fruits and corn a prey of the flames, and the whole was done so remarkably 
quick that in half an hour's time all the buildings, actually burned down, stood in 
full flames. It was lucky that it happened in day-time and not during the night, as 
otherwise many a life would have been lost ; but thousand times thanks to our 
Lord there was no accident of the kind. On a conflagration which came so sud- 
denly scarcely nothing of personal property could be saved ; many of them have 
commenced rebuilding like [several names torn out,] cousin Andreas Kirgerber, 
who sends thousand greetings, and many others. As we are now under a differ- 
ent " regime," that of the Landgraf of Anspach, which is near Nuremberg, many 
things are changed here, the town having formerly been under the dominion of 
Hackenburg, but now in consequence of an exchange we belong to the margrave 
alone, whereby changes in the manner of building are to be observed which cause 
many expenses, and no one can build up his house again on the spot it formerly 
stood on. but had to build in conformity with certain street regulations. The fire 
made many people poor, and the loss of the 1740 barrels of wine and vineyards, 
during the late war, reduced the inhabitants so much that I am afraid that Ben- 
dorff will never be again what it was before — commerce and trade in general 
being in poor condition. Amongst other news I may mention that Pastor Schmitt 
and his wife are dead, also Knobels, and your cousin, Mrs. Ruckert, away from 
seven children. 

Of your four letters we have not received one, except the first one, whereupon 
we wrote again immediately and would have written oftener since, if we had 
known of an opportunity available. I am very much surprised that cousin 
Henry in Hochstenbach, did not write to you through the opportunity which was 
offered to him. It seems, however, as if your sister dear, our cousin, had died, 
some information of the kind having reached us at the time my mother-in-law 
was still living. Her loss was very much lamented by my mother-in-law and all 
the friends, and they all wished she would live yet. •* * * 

As regards her succession cousin Anton Kirberger has been curator over it, and 
was trying to get something out yet, but the matter was treated so copiously that 
the lawyers made the most of it. 

Although he took the matter at heart more than a brother, he could not attain 
his purpose to have bankruptcy declared, in which ease everything would have 
been divided honestly. * * * 

Our Lord the Almighty restitute it to you 1000 times, and bestow upon you 
good health and a long life; 1000 greetings to all relations and friends whatever 



The Germany of Yesterday and To-day. 67 

their names may be, and that they all may prosper. I would most obediently 
request that you may avail yourself of the first opportunity offering to write 
again, and we shall surely answer by returning opportunity. You would at the 
same time do us a favor to write us something about the customs of the country, 
the description of houses, mills, furniture, gardening, vegetables and what the 
difference is between those we have in Germany, and about iron for the mechanics, 
and cloth, and anything connected with husbandry and agriculture ? And now I 
leave you all to the mercy and providence of our Lord, recommending myself to 
your continued remembrance, and remain with our best salutations and much 
esteem. Your all, sincerest friend and servant, 

JoH. Geo. HaCtER, Prreceptor. 

" On the human imagination events produce the effect of time." 
I am indebted to Cooper for this idea — No ! not for the idea, but 
for the words expressing it ; for no one discourses more eloquently, 
than does this novelist, of the links of recollection that bring 
back to the mind the innumerable changes in a comparatively 
short period, which causes a recent date to appear as remote as 
the days of dark antiquity. A. D. 1 745 is not a long time ago ; 
the span of existence of but few lives would bring us back to 
that year ; but yet, when one contemplates the astounding alter- 
ations that have taken place in the map of Europe since that 
date, events seem to mark a far greater lapse of time than do the 
intervening years. When the writer of this old letter was 
rounding his sentences, Germany was composed of hundreds 
of separate kingdoms and principalities, each with conflicting 
interests, their rulers at all times ready to pounce on each others' 
territory in defence of real or imaginary rights, or in vengeance 
for fancied wrongs. Prussia was still in the throes of its 
birth ; Frederick, not yet the Great, was in his direst stress, and 
in imminent danger of having to abandon to Maria Theresa, that 
Silesia which he had bought with so much blood and treasure. 
But, two days after this letter was written, he was saved from 
that humiliation by the battle of Hohenfriedberg, once of world- 
wide renown, now almost forgotten. 

It is when the mind reverts to the altered conditions of the 
political and personal relations between ruler and subject 
in Germany, and the great strides taken on the Continent 
in the advancement of individual rights, that one recog- 
nizes how different, as affecting the daily lives and destinies 
of mankind, is the world of yesterday from that of to-day. 
In the preceptor's letter there is no sentence weighted with 



68 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

such meaning as the few words announcing the transfer of 
Bendorf from the sovereignty of Hackenberg to that of Anspach. 
Late in the seventeenth century Bendorf was included in the 
county of Sayn-Altenkirchen, which also comprised the districts 
of Friedewald, Freusburg and Altenkirchen. It was probably 
known to the Herr Prseceptor as the sovereignty of Hackenberg 
because of the records having been preserved in that town. 
This territory was the personal estate of Johannetta, wife of the 
Duke Joh. George I., of Sachsen-Eisenach. By her will of the 
thirtieth of November, 1685, it was to descend, under the rule 
of primogeniture, in the line of her eldest son. In 1741, the 
male line having become extinct, it passed to the descendants of 
her daughter, Eleonora Sophie, wife of the Margrave .Johann. 
Fredrick of Brandenburg- Anspach, and consequently fell to her 
grandson, the Margrave Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, of Anspach, 
who reigned from 1729 to 1757. I have already spoken of the 
despotic power of petty German princes in the eighteenth cen- 
tury. They ruled over dominions often no larger than one of our 
counties, and outside of the boundaries of Prussia and Austria, 
Germany was a patchwork of — when you include free cities and 
the estates of imperial knights — hundreds of large and small 
governments. Nor were they compact, as their several posses- 
sions were frequently at detached distances, as we seQ by this 
letter was the case in the margrave of Anspach acquiring Ben- 
dorf. All these princes maintained courts and armies, and their 
poor subjects were taxed and oppressed to support the luxury 
and state of the rulers and privileged classes. The peasants 
were not much better off than serfs, and hordes of officials levied 
tribute on even the middle and better classes occupying the 
towns and cities. In some localities sumptuary laws regulated 
the dress and the food of the people. As Frederick of Prussia 
grew stronger in his government, matters in this regard were 
much improved, his example having a beneficial effect on the 
better class of sovereigns, inducing them to have some respect 
for the rights of their people; but yet, freedom of the individual, 
such as was at that time known and enjoyed in the American 
colonies, had no holding or understanding in the average Ger- 
man mind. 

When Johannes read this letter, if he knew anything of 



Bendorf's Wicked Ruler. 69 

the character of the margrave of Anspach, he had good 
cause for devoutly thanking God that he and those dear to him 
were no longer citizens of Bendorf, and, consequently, subject to 
the will and caprice of a ruler who was entirely without sympathy 
for the rights and wrongs of his people, and who himself was 
governed by impulse and prejudice, rather than by a knowledge 
of justice, and an intuitive sense of what was due a community 
over which the chance of birth had placed him. Like all men 
controlled by their impulses, he could, at times, be generosity 
itself, but, nevertheless, his subjects preferred to give him a wide 
berth, acting as had done those of the previous king of Prussia — 
Frederick the Great's father — who used to fly around corners on 
the approach of their doughty monarch, fearing to be whacked 
over their shoulders by his stout cane. But, when the margrave 
was in a bad temper, and his judgment distorted by passion, his 
cruelties were apt to be of the most atrocious character. This 
was rendered more deplorable by the power he wielded over the 
destinies of the people he ruled ; at such a time woe betide the 
noble, burgher or peasant upon whom he set his malignant eye in 
anger. Numerous instances are given of the severity and 
excesses of this prince. In 1740 he imprisoned for life one 
Christopher Wilhelm Von Rauser, who was merely suspected or 
accused of posting up caricatures of the court. Once, on hearing 
that his dogs were not well fed, he rode to the house of the man 
who had them in charge and shot him dead on his own doorstep. 
In 1747 he hanged, without trial, a poor servant girl, who was 
accused of helping a soldier to desert. As the margrave was 
riding out of his castle one day, he asked the sentinel on guard, 
who happened not to be a regular soldier, for his muskot ; the 
unfortunate fellow, recognizing his prince and not daring to dis- 
obey, unhesitatingly gave up his piece, whereupon the margrave 
called him a coward and no soldier, and had two hussars drag 
him through the mill-pond; of which treatment he died. It is not 
my purpose to continue the recountal of the idiosyncracies and 
wickednesses of this murdering prince. The personality of such 
a ruler could not but have a far-reaching influence for evil on all 
his representatives, and the citizens of distant Bendorf had to bear 
their proportion of the sorrows occasioned by such a government. 
Nor was escape by emigrati'^n any longer an easy matter, as 



70 The Story of an Old Farm. 

under the new regime, no subject could leave the dominions of 
the margrave without his permission, and that permission was 
not be had for the asking. I shall again have occasion to refer 
to Anspach, when we find, some thirty years later, the troops of 
that principality marching across Somerset county, in New Jer- 
sey, in their endeavor to assist King George III. in his hold on 
the revolted American colonies. 

Communications by post convey in their pages a subtle charm 
quite wanting in spoken words. Letters sent from persons for 
whose views and opinions one cares but little when present, are 
often received with pleasure and read with interest, when the 
writer is but a few days' journey away ; such is the mysterious 
something an enclosed missive carries within its envelope. If 
this be so, how important an event must have been the arrival 
of this long message from Germany. Letters were great affairs 
in those days, and three, four, and often five months were occu- 
pied in their coming from the old country. We can easily pict- 
ure with what eager interest Johannes' family gathered about 
him as he read aloud these closely-written pages from Bendorf. 
Perhaps they expressed surprise at the marriage of Magdalena 
with the schoolmaster, though they were surely glad of a new 
relative who could write so good a letter. But Mariah Katrina 
could not forget his predecessor. Preceptor Kippold, whose wife 
had been her best friend, and had stood godmother for her sec- 
ond boy, Andrew, in 1729, How they all wondered, as they 
heard of the great fire ; what words of sympathy fell from their 
lips as were mentioned the names of friends and neighbors 
whose all had been devoured by the flames. Tears doubtless fell 
as the death of this or that loved one was made known. They 
probably already knew that Maria Katrina's sisters, Mrs. Otto 
and Mrs. Kirberger, had died, but that the dearly-beloved pastor, 
Joh. Georg Schmidt and his wife, were no more was, indeed, a 
new grief. Had not the reverend man been the life-long friend 
of the parents ? Had he not married them, baptized all of their 
children, and stood at the open graves of the two little ones 
they had left lying under German sod? They had tender 
thoughts for the seven children that the wife of the fruit-dealer, 
Simon Ludwig Riickert, had left motherless; and they were sorry 
enough to hear of the death of their old friend, Gottfried Knebel, 



The Kirberger Family. 71 

who had stood godfather for, and given his name to Johannes' 
youngest brother in 1724. How the good wife must have shud- 
dered at the recital of the losses and distresses caused by the 
late war, and have thanked God, too, that there was no prospect 
of war and its bitterness in America. You may be sure that all 
the gossip of the preceptor was read and re-read. That they 
regretted the copiousness of the lawyers in settling the estate of 
Mariah Katrina's sister is a matter of course, — the cormorants 
of the profession evidently did not originate on this side of the 
water. 

Anton Kirberger, the curator, who was so unsuccessful in pre- 
serving the estate from the hungry attorneys, was not a brother 
of Mariah Katrina, but probably a cousin, being the son of 
Joh. Wilhelm Kirberger of Bendorf, and a prominent citizen 
and court assessor of that place. He was certainly closely 
allied to the family, and, in 1724, stood godfather with Knebel 
to Johannes' youngest brother, Gottfried, and, in 1732, performed 
the same service for Johannes' son, Georg Anthon. It was his 
brother, Ehrenreich Kirberger, who, in 1725, acted as godfather 
for, and gave his name to, Johannes' oldest son, Ehrenreich, or 
Aaron. Their father was probably the brother of Burgomaster 
Gottfried Kirberger. This magistrate married, in 1673, the 
^^ right respectable Jimgfrau^^ Veronica Gerdrutta, the daughter 
of the deceased Rev. Joh. Thumers, of Bendorf. Their children 
were Anna Barbara, Johannes Jack, Johann. Philipp, Anna 
Cathrina, Johann. Weimar, Andreas and Elizabeth. In 1694 the 
Burgomaster married, as his second wife, Elizabeth Margaretha, 
daughter of Peter Israel, of Altenkirchen. Their children were 
Veronica Gerdrutta, who married Georg Peter Otto; Maria Mar- 
garetha ; Maria Catherina, who married Johannes Moelich ; and 
Johann. Heinrich. It seems odd that the first-born of this second 
marriage should receive the name of the first wife — it certainly 
shows that the burgomaster's second choice had a patient and 
self-sacrificing nature. Her youngest child was the "Cousin 
Henry" mentioned in Preceptor Hager's letter, he being at that 
time the burgomaster of Hochstenbach. 

I have another old letter from Bendorf, dated four years later. 
Like the first, it is yellow and time-stained, though its odd old- 
German characters are as legible as if lately penned. The 



72 The Story of an Old Farm. 

writer was Johannes' wife's cousin, the curator, and he tells the 
same story, as did the preceptor, of marriages and deaths, of 
wars, and of the great fire, which latter seems to have been the 
most important event of that age in the existence of the villagers. 
But, here is the letter ! — let it speak for itself. 

Bendorf, 25th May, 1749. 

Highly esteemed cousin and lady: I have seen witli great pleasure from 
your letter that you and your good lady with your family are well, and so are 
we and our other friends and acquaintances. We are glad to hear, and so are 
these people, that you are doing well. As regards myself, my wife and our chil- 
dren, we are, thank God, in good health and spirits ; the Almighty keep them 
and ourselves so for many years longer ! Otherwise there has been transpiring a 
good deal of news which, of course, we cannot write all. I don't know whether 
you have heard of the great fire which we had here in 1743. All that part 
from the Oberbach Gate to tlie pastor's house, and on the other side down to the 
C?esar's house up to Ralter house was destroyed, burning down everything to 
the ground, including the gates and your former house. Pilberger's house is the 
only one which was saved, all the rest being burnt down, so that no one could 
recognise certain places any more at all. Much cattle was burnt, too, but, 
thank God, no lives were lost. A good deal has been built up again since, but 
there is plenty of waste-ground yet, and the new buildings are erected much 
costlier than before. We belong now to the Margrave of Anspach, who ordered 
an architect to be sent who suprintends the erection of buildings, laying them 
all out in straight streets. I have, thanks to God, got through with my build- 
ing; I have put up a house about six times as large as my former dwelling was. 
Your brother-in-law, Holingshausen, lives in Pilberger's house. 

[two lines illegible.] 
but he is in bad circumstances, he cannot do much any more, because he trembles 
so much, just like his mother did. 

In consequence of the fire many people moved away, others became sick and 
many died. Your cousin, Otto, died half a year ago ; Joh. Weimar Kirberger 
died two months ago; old Hergemann died eight days ago; Pastor Schmit and 
his beloved are dead long ago, which you have, no doubt, heard already. We 
also had a good deal of war since, but have peace now. Joh. Michael Moelich 
is still living, but his wife is dead. 

I would wish that we could converse verbally, but as this cannot be the case, I 
send my greetings to all of you. 

And remain your sincere cousin, 

Joh. Anton Kirberger. 

It will be seen by this letter that Maria Katrina was now 
called upon to mourn the death of her half-brother, Johan. 
Weimar, and her sister Veronica's husband, Georg Peter Otto. 
The peace referred to by the writer of this letter was that fol- 
lowing the second Silesian war, between Prussia and Austi-ia 
and their numerous allies. Frederick II. had withdrawn from 
the conflict in 1745, but the war was continued by Austria 



Bendorf Billets Troops m 1749. 



73 



against France and Spain till the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 
1748. It was during these later years that Marshall Saxe 
gained his famous victories of Laufeldt, Ragoux and Fontenoy, 
the latter being fought in the presence of Louis XV. and the 
dauphin. The vicinity of Bendorf suffered but little from 
actual conflicts, but the Rhine was the highway between Aus- 
tria and Holland, which latter country was the fighting ground 
of the war. Bodies of troops were constantly passing and repass- 
ing along its banks, exacting from the villagers billets and for- 
ages, and impoverishing the people by the thefts and extortions 
always inflicted on a rural community by a foreign soldiery. 
Cousin Kirberger might well rejoice at the advent of peace, and 
the opportunity for recuperation it brought to the people of his 
neighborhood. The repose, alas ! was not to be for long. The 
Seven Years' War, but a few years ahead, was lying in wait for 
its victims — that great combat, in which nearly all Europe was 
to be engaged, and which was to emblazon on the pages of his- 
tory, for all time, the illustrious name of Frederic us Magnus ; 
that conflict which ultimately resulted in the unification — in the 
kingdom of Prussia — of the many electorates, duchies, bishoprics, 
and dominions of landgraves and princes that then formed the 
inextricable jumble, and most extraordinary patch-work, called 
the map of Germany. 












CHAPTER VII. 

Johannes Moelich Appears in New Jersey in 1747 — All About 
His Brother Godfrey— Echoes from the Ancient Walls of Z ion 
Lutheran Church at New Germantown. 

Johannes faded from our view at Germantown, Pennsylvania, 
in 1735. He emerges from the mists of the years in Decem- 
ber, 1747, in Greenwich township, Sussex, now Warren, county, 
New Jersey, where he appears as the purchaser from John F. 
Garrets of four himdred and nine acres of land fronting on the 
Delaware river and "Pohohatacong" creek. This investment 
Avas made for the joint benefit of himself and his youngest 
brother Gottfried, whom it will be remembered as a lad of 
eleven accompanied Johannes to America. Gottfried — known 
in family annals as Godfrey — was. born in Bendorf on the Rhine 
in 1724, and after reaching this country continued to be a mem- 
ber of our ancestor's household until he was twenty-one years 
old. On growing to man's estate he settled on this land border- 
ing " Pohohatacong " creek and the Delaware, in which vicinity 
many of liis posterity are now living. 

On the twenty-eighth of November, 1758, Johannes conveyed 
to this brother one hundred and eighty-one acres of the four hun- 
dred and nine that he had acquired from John F. Garrets. The 
deed recited that at the time of the conveyance he, the grantee, 
was in actual possession of the land conveyed, and that "he, the 
said Godfrey Moelich, was a prime purchaser, and was to have 
been a party in the grant and conveyance of the said four hun- 
dred and nine acres, and for that purpose paid one hundred and 
forty-nine pounds, his share of the consideration money agreed 
by thorn to be paid by the said Godfrey Moelich, the receipt of 
which said sum, he, the said Johannes, doth hereby acknowledge to 



Johannes, and Jacob Kline in Hunterdon. 75 

have had." From all of the above it would appear that Johannes 
acted as guardian for his younger brother, having brought funds 
with him to America to insure his proper settlement when of age. 
Godfrey increased his possessions that same year by purchasing 
one hundred and fifty acres of land from William Lovet Smith, 
for one hundred and fifty pounds. Long before this time he had 
built a stone house on the Garrets land, and for ten years had 
been married. In May, 1748, he took unto himself a bride of 
fifteen summers, Margaret, the daughter of Christopher Falken- 
berger, a young woman of some education and refinement, as is 
evidenced by her correspondence, preserved by her descend- 
ants. 

Johannes does not seem to have occupied his portion of the 
land on the Delaware. On his death it became the homestead 
of his second son, Andrew. Papers in my possession show that 
in the year 1750 he was living in Readington township, Hunter- 
don county, where he was interested in a tannery with Johann. 
Jacob Klein (Jacob Kline), who had, a few years before mar- 
ried his eldest daughter, Veronica Gerdrutta (Fanny). Though 
I have no documentary evidence in proof of the assertion, there 
is every reason to believe that at that time the homestead of 
Johannes was a farm of four hundred acres — two hun- 
dred of which was in black oak timber — located adjoining the 
present line of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, midway 
between the White House and North Branch stations. The 
land lay on both sides of the County Line road, and extended 
north to the slope of Leslie's ridge, being crossed from east to 
west by Leslie's brook. Whether the title to this land vested 
in our ancestor, or whether he merely occupied it in con- 
junction with his son-in-law I am not informed. Ultimately it 
came into the sole possession of Jacob Kline, and there is no doubt 
that here he and his father-in-law established a tannery, prob- 
ably the first one in northern New Jersey. The Hon. Joseph 
Thompson, when eighty years of age, wrote me that he well 
remembered the old bark and currying houses that stood on the 
Kline property ; and that John, the grandson of Jacob Kline, 
had often pointed out to him the location, of the dwelling of his 
grandfather, Moelich, as being just south of the brook, and on the 
other side of the road from his — John's — residence. On this 



76 The Story of an Old Farm. 

property Jacob Kline and his sons and grandsons carried on an 
extensive tannery business for over seventy-five years. The 
land is no longer in possession of the family, the original four 
hundred acres being now sub-divided into the farms of George 
W. Coles, Walter Opie and George Stillwell. " The Ridge " 
obtained its name from George Leslie of Perth Amboy, of whom 
we shall learn much in a future chapter. It is a rise of land 
commencing at Leslie's brook, and in breadth extends nearly 
two miles to Rockaway creek and Lamington river. In length 
it is traversed by the New Brunswick and Easton turnpike, 
which soon after leaving North Branch village (going westward) 
attains a considerable elevation that is maintained three or four 
miles until White House is approached, where by a gradual des- 
cent the general level of the country is again reached. Here on 
this breezy upland and along its slopes, from which the surround- 
ing county is viewed like a map unrolled, have dwelt, and still 
dwell many of the descendants of Johannes' son-in-law, " Old 
Jacob Kline." 

We learn from the records of the '' Kirchen Buch der Corpor- 
ation von Zion in New Germantown in West Jersey^'' that 
Johannes Moelich was an active member and officer of Zion 
Lutheran church in Tewksbury, then Lebanon, township, in 
the same county. The exact date of the establishment of this 
congregation is not known. As early as 1730 there were 
German-Lutherans in the vicinity of what is now New German- 
town, it being supposed that they came from Germantown, 
Pennsylvania. In 1749, Zion corporation had been for some 
time in existence, and in that year a new church building " was 
solemnly dedicated to the service of God by the brethren Brunn- 
holtz, Handschuch, Hartwig, Schaum and Kurtz." This 
antique structure is still standing, and its thick stone walls will 
doubtless continue to house congregations for generations to 
come. Since those early days, however, it has undergone many 
alterations, and in present appearance differs materially from 
that of the original edifice, which in outward form was not unlike 
the little church on Pohick creek in Virginia, built a few years 
later, where Washington worshiped. An immense roof, con- 
verging to the centre, capped the walls, in which small windows 
were set high from the ground. A huge sounding board sur- 



ZiON Lutheran Church at New Germantown. 77 

mounted the lofty pulpit, and in the center of the building, in 
the broad middle aisle, was a square pit in which burned 
in cold weather a bright charcoal fire. It has been suggested 
that this fire served not only for the comfort of the worshipers 
but as an illustration for the preacher, who pointed his finger at 
the glowing bed of coals when dwelling on the everlasting fire 
that awaited the ungodly. In 1831 the quaint building was 
remodeled. The old barrack -like roof made way for one more 
modern in style, Gothic windows were introduced, the 
exterior waUs were covered with a composition of lime, sand and 
pebbles, and a vestibule, spire and bell added. Within ten 
years still greater changes followed, and the auditorium was 
made to more nearly conform to the present fashion of church 
interiors. 

There is still in existence the original instrument by which 
Ralph Smith conveyed to the trustees of Zion congregation 
seven and one quarter acres of land, which included the site of 
the church then "newly erected." It is in the form of a lease 
running one hundred and four years, demanding an annual quit- 
rent of ''nine pence three farthings for each one acre, of 
Procklamation money." This portentous document is elabor- 
ately inscribed on a heavy piece of sheep-parchment over two 
feet in breadth, the ink of the text still being distinctly black, 
although that of the signatures has grown pale, while yet per- 
fectly legible. The leasehold was ultimately converted into a 
fee by the commutation of the quit-rent. The phraseology of 
the conveyance begins in this wise : 

This Indenture made this tenth Day of November in the Year of Our Lord 
One Thousand Seven Hundred and Forty-Nine, Between Kalph Smith, Esq., of 
Lebanon in the County of Hunterdon and Province of New Jersey, on the One 
Part, and Baltis Bickle, Hones Melek, Philip Phise, alias White, Casper Hender- 
shot, Lowrence Rulifson, Samuell Barnard, David Melek, Jacob Cline, Adam 
Vockerot, Jacob Shipmann, George Swart and Joseph Hornbaker, Trustees to 
the Luthern Congregation in the Countys of Hunterdon, Somerset and Morris, 
on the other part, Witnesses, etc. 

None of the names of the lessees are correctly spelled. The 
second one is, of course, that of our German ancestor. The writ- 
ing of the lease, which is in a good, round, clerkly hand, is that of 
Smith, the lessor, who wrote Hones for Honnes, which is Hollan- 
disch, or Low Dutch, for John. Ralph Smith was an English- 



78 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

man of wealth, and a large land-holder in what is now New Ger- 
mantown. He came to Lebanon township from Boston in 1734, 
and is said to have been ambitious to found a town, which he 
desired should be called Smithfield. With the influx of Ger- 
mans, however, his influence was not strong enough to prevent 
the village from being named after the Pennsylvania town from 
which many of these new-comers had migrated. Although all 
early documents mention this neighborhood simply as " King 
Street," or Tewksbury, Smith persisted in using the name 
Smithfield in his leases, even after the high-sheriff of Hunterdon 
plainly designated it in a public advertisement as New German- 
town. The first record of this last name appears in a legal 
instrument drawn by Richard Stockton of Princeton, dated 
the twentieth of July, 1760. AVhile Ralph Smith was unable to 
control the nationality of new arrivals, he endeavored, at least, to 
dictate the nature of the religious observances they should intro- 
duce into the neighborhood. He inserted in the lease of the 
church lot a clause which provided that Zion society should not 
allow '' any other doctrin to be taught but that, according to the 
Lutherrien scheem, excepting a farther advance towards the 
Protestant Churches now established, according to the doctrins, 
contained in the Thirty-nine Artickles of the Church of England, 
or according to the Presbyterian scheem as professed and 
adhered to in America." The lessor was evidently solicitous 
that no popish errors should be propagated in the community. 
But imperfectly understanding the Lutherrien scheem (as he 
styled it) — for the services of that church were mostly in Ger- 
man — he was careful to provide that the preaching in the new 
house should not deviate in any essential respect from the doc- 
trines of the Thirty-nine Ai'ticles and the Westminster Confes- 
sion of Faith. 

For several reasons this conveyance from Ralph Smith pos- 
sesses an interest for the historian of Johannes Moelich. First, 
as showing who were at that time his co-trustees in Zion ; and 
second, in the fact that his name appears among the first of the 
trustees. As their names were probably placed in the order of 
their importance, it is fair to presume that Johannes ranked 
among the most prominent of the officers and congregation. 
" Baltis Bickle," or more properly speaking, Balthazar Pickel^ 



Baltis Pickel and Other Worthies. 7& 

was easily the first in possessions, age and social consequence in 
that German community. He was a native of Hamburg, and 
early in the century settled in Hunterdon county, purchasing a 
large tract of land at the foot of that considerable elevation which 
in consequence of that purchase lost its euphonious Indian 
appellation of Cushetunk, and has since been known as Pickel's 
mountain. Here his descendants for several generations have 
lived, and a portion of the original purchase is still in possession 
of the family. At the death of Balthazar Pickle, by his will he 
bequeathed one thousand pounds to Zion church, the intention 
of the pious donor being that the interest on this sum should pay 
the whole of the minister's salary. In this regard his expecta- 
tions were not fulfilled. The money willed must have been in 
colonial pounds, as the total amount realized from the bequest 
by the trustees was a little less than two thousand dollars. Baltis 
and his wife Charity, ''good old mother Pickel," lie buried close 
to the east walls of Zion. His grave stone bears the following 
inscription : 

Here lies the body of 

Baltis Pickel 

Who departed this Life, Dec. 5th, 1765, 

In the 79th year of his age. 

Kemember me as you pass by. 

As you are now so onst was I, 

As I am now so must you be 

Prepare for death and follow me. 

Near by is the grave of a youth of twenty, bearing the same 
name, upon whose stone is the following curious verse : 

My Dwelling Place is here 

This Stone is got 

To Keep the Spot 
That men dig not too near. 

The date of the advent in Hunterdon county of David Moe- 
lich — mentioned as one of the church trustees — has not been 
ascertained. He is believed to have been our ancestor's cousin. 
David was born in Bendorf in 1715, being the son of Hans 
Peter, who it is supposed, was a brother of Johannes' father. 
Jonas Moelich, a bachelor brother of David, who was 
bom in Bendorf in 1710, was also at this time a Hunter- 
don resident and a member of Zion congregation. There was 



80 The Story of an Old Farm. 

still another of the name then living in Lebanon township, who 
later became prominent in the affairs of Zion society. This 
fourth Moelich was Antony, Anton or Tunis, Johannes' nephew, 
he being the son of Johann. Peter, who emigrated unmarried 
from Bendorf in 1728, but who must have found himself a wife 
soon after arrival, as his oldest child, Tunis, was born in 1730. 
It would be very agreeable to tell the whole story of the rich 
historical memories that cling to these old walls of Zion. Such 
a story would entail the narrative of the growth of population in 
this section of New Jersey; but, just now, our interest in this 
church lies with some of its early founders and their suc- 
cessors, and we must confine our notice to such incidents in the 
life of the society as relate to our German ancestor and his chil- 
dren. It may be mentioned, however, that as early as 1745 it 
appears that the Reverend Henry Melchior Muhlenberg occa- 
sionly supplied Zion pulpit, while at the same time having gen- 
eral charge of the affairs of the congregation. This divine, — 
familiarly known as Father Muhlenberg — was born in Hanover 
in 1711 ; after graduating at the University of Gottingen, which 
he had entered in 1735, he settled at Halle. The early German 
emigrants to America were essentially a religious people, and to 
them no distress connected with exile was more grievous than 
the loss of the religious instruction they had known in the old 
country. During the first four decades of the last century there 
was not in New York or New Jersey a properly-accredited 
clergyman of the Lutheran persuasion. The people of that faith 
repeatedly implored the home church to send them a minister. 
After much urging, Mr. Muhlenberg consented to accept charge 
of the American churches, and reached Philadelphia on the 
twenty-fifth of November, 1 742. The Germans realized in him 
the consummation of their highest hopes for a priest, and with 
great joy they welcomed the ministering of holy religion in the 
form and manner of the church in fatherland. The labors, suf- 
ferings and successes of this Lutheran patriarch are matters of 
eccelesiastical history. To the character of an humble and sin- 
cere Christian were joined natural qualifications and educational 
acquirements that peculiarly fitted him for the arduous and 
varied duties incidental to his position. He was a skilful sur- 
geon as well as a ripe theologian, and could preach to his con- 



Reverend Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. 81 

gregation with equal facility in English, German and Low 
Dutch. Grentleness and firmness in him were singularly 
blended; his wise counsel and tender sympathies won such 
respect and devotion that throughout his life his influence among 
the Germans was unbounded. We are told that his eloquence 
was of an order that would equally move and melt the heart of 
the wildest frontiersman, or rivet the attention of the most cul- 
tured and educated member of the synod. In 1745 he removed 
from Philadelphia to the village of La Trappe — New Providence 
— in Montgomery county, Pennsylvania, which at that time con- 
tained the largest and most important German congregation in 
the country. From then until his death, in 1787, he seems to 
have had a general oversight of, and to have exercised a sort of 
presiding eldership over, the churches of the Lutheran denomin- 
ation. He was a wonderful organizer of congregations. Heat 
nor cold, storm nor wind, robbers nor Indians, could daunt his 
energies or repress the enthusiasm of the missionary spirit, which 
led him to travel thousands of miles through the Middle and 
Southern States at the call of his German brethren. The rare 
virtues and talents of this unusual man were, to a remarkable 
degree, transmitted to his posterity through successive genera- 
tions. As clergymen, soldiers, statesmen, educators, authors 
and poets, we find that his children, grandchildren and great- 
grandchildren have taken rank with the most distinguished men 
of the country. 

The first missionary of Zion church was the Reverend 
Johannes Christophorus Hartwig, (anglice), John Christopher 
Hartwick, who contributed his erratic services during the years 
1747-1748. He did not tarry long in Tewksbury as his useful- 
ness was much impaired by an unfortunate repugnance he felt 
towards all womankind. Neighborhood gossip recites that he 
would cross the road, or even leap a fence, to avoid meeting one 
of the gentler sex. The story is told that when preaching in 
New York state, on awaking one morning at the home of a 
parishioner, he found that the good woman of the house had 
arisen in the night and silently spread a thick petticoat over the 
bed, lest he should suffer with the cold ; so indignant was the 
clergyman that he made his way to the stable, saddled his horse, 
and rode off before breakfast. On the seventh of September^ 



82 The Story of an Old Farm. 

1748, there arrived at Philadelphia, by the ship " Hampshire,'^ 
Captain Thomas Cheeseman, from Rotterdam, the Reverend Joh. 
Albert Weygand. At the instigation of Father Muhlenberg, he 
was soon preaching at New Germantown as a candidate, and in 
the following year this immigrant-minister was invited to be the 
regular pastor of the congregation. Among the seventy-eight 
names signed to his call were those of Baltus Pickel, Johannes 
Moelich, Samuel Earnhardt, Jacob Kline, Joseph Hornbaker, 
Philip Weiss, Lawrence Roelifson and others. Mr. Weygand's 
services proved very acceptable to the people and it was during 
his pastorate that the church edifice was completed and dedi- 
cated. How long he officiated is not exactly known, but it is cer- 
tain that in a printed publication of 1755 he is spoken of as 
" the minister of the old Lutheran Church at New York and 
Hackensack " — serving alternately the people of Bergen and 
Rockland counties, and the congregation of New York city. 

Following Mr. Weygand came, in about the year 1754, Pastor 
Ludolph Heinrich Schrenck ; his stay was short and his depar- 
ture is unrecorded. During these changes and vacancies 
Father Muhlenberg continued his episcopal direction of Zion's 
people. In the autumn of 1760 he sent a young man — Reverend 
Paul Bryzelius — on horseback to the " hill country of New Jer- 
sey," to preach to the waiting congregations of Zion and St. Paul. 
Of the latter church society we shall learn something shortly. 
With him he dispatched a letter addressed to his '* highly 
respected and dearly beloved Brethren Messieurs Balthasar Pickel 
and John Moelich, senior, at Racheway, etc." This last word 
expresses Father Muhlenberg's endeavor to spell Rockaway, the 
name of the stream which drains the country west and south of 
Tewksbury tOAvnship, and upon the south branch of which lived 
Balthazar Pickle. The writer of this letter makes another effort 
to anglicise — this time a foreign, not a native word. The name 
" Brucelius " is written in English, and was evidently an attempt 
to convey in Roman characters the sound of the young clergy- 
man's name. In subsequent entries upon the church books 
Muhlenberg wrote it Bry.?elius. Doctor Hazelius, afterwards of 
Zion's pulpit, and himself of Swedish origin, spelled it *' Brize-. 
lius." But enough of preface ! Here is a translation of this 
pastoral message from the last century : 



Father Muhlenberg's Letters to Zion Chuhch. 83 

Worthy and Beloved Fathers and Brethren : Herewith I send in my 
place on a visit an honest teacher, namely, Domine Brucelius, who studied in 
Sweden and traveled several years in Germany and England, and tried many 
things. He is still in his best years, cheerful and very industrious, humble and 
friendly in company, lives sober, godly and exemplary, and understands well how 
to deal with the rich and poor, with the learned and unlearned, with the sick and 
healthy ; has a great knowledge in the true Christianity, and tries to lead soula 
to Lord Jesus ; understands good English and German. Since, however, in past 
years he preached mostly in Swedish and English, and had little practice in the 
Gei-man language, therefore, German seems a little difficult. He will very soon, 
however, regain his knowledge of German when he has had just a little practice. 
You will hear and see for yourselves wherein he will please you in doctrine and 
conversation, and write me what you think of him. 

I am for the present not able to pay his traveling expenses, and hope the dear 
brethren will take care of this out of love because he has hired from his congre- 
gation a horse for the journey, which he must himself pay for. 

Receive him in love as a true servant of Jesus, and make his conversation use- 
ful to you. To your wives and worthy relations, especially to the long-suffering 
sick mother, Pickel, give consolation out of the abounding love of Jesus, and be 
true even unto death ; then will you receive the crown of life and glory. 

Thus wishes, worthy and beloved fathers and brethren, your old well-wisher 
and friend, Henry Muhlenberg. 

New Providence, 25 Nov., 1760. 

This day I have buried my youngest son. 

This young minister found such favor with the good people of 
the hill country as to be regularly called as their pastor, and he 
continued preaching to the congregations of New Germantown 
and Pluckamin until 1767, when he removed to Nova Scotia. 
He was the first occupant of the parsonage near the first named 
village. In May following Mr. Bryzelius' removal, Father 
Muhlenberg was elected ''Rector" of the united churches of Zion 
and St. Paul. As the patriarch never resided in New Jersey, 
and continued, as before, the pastor of the Lutheran churches of 
Philadelphia, the inference is that the election and formal accept- 
ance was a prudential measure intended to further the temporal 
interests of the united congregations. During the vacancy of their 
pulpits he occasionally occupied them, as did the Rev. Christian 
Streit, who was afterward the pastor of a Lutheran congregation 
at Easton, Pennsylvania. Father Muhlenberg appears, how- 
ever, at all times to have given his personal care and direction 
to the affairs of the society. Not long after the departure of Mr. 
Bryzelius he addressed to the brethren the following quaint and 
characteristic letter, advising them as to their course while with- 
out a spiritual guide. The reference to Bedminster will be 



84 The Story of an Old Farm. 

made plain, later, when we come upon the founding of St. Paul's 
congregation at Pluckamin. The superscription in English 
reads : 

To the Wardens and Vestries of the United Lutheran Churches in New Ger- 
mantown and Bedminster. 

The original letter is in German : 

Honorable Corporation, Beloved Brethren : I recently wrote a letter 
to you and gave it to Mr. Bartles. Eev. Kurtz, our old minister, has promised to 
make a visit to the United Congregations after the Holy days of the dear Lord. 
If he sliould be too feeble for so difficult a winter journey, some one younger will 
come. 1 beseech, however, the Honorable Corporation that she take care of her 
charter and order, and open the churches to no disorderly preachers or tramps. 
The fugitives who run where they have not been sent must stop with their equals. 
Because where the carcass is there gather the eagles. 

The Honorable Corporation will take also into consideration and provide that 
during the coming spring the parsonage may be set in habitable order. It would 
be very good if the God-fearing members of both congregations would assemble 
on Sundays in their churclies, would sing together an edifying hymn, order some- 
ting to be read, and would pray. Some one will be amongst the brethren who 
can do it. 

1 send you my hearty greeting, and hope we may soon meet again. 

I am your old 

Friend Muhlenberg. 

Philadelphia, 10 Dec, 1767. 

The next incumbent at New Germantown came to New Jer- 
sey confident of possessing the affections and esteem of her 
people, for he was John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, the eldest 
son of the patriarch, who after much solicitation had consented 
to serve as resident deputy-rector for his father. He occupied 
Zion's pulpit for the first time on the fifth of February, 1769, 
and continued to supply that and St. Paul's for three years. He 
awakened an enthusiastic devotion in the members of his flock, 
and though at this time but twenty-three years old, he soon 
won their respect as well as their aflfections. In 1772 his father 
was applied to by the Germans of the valley of the Blue Ridge, 
Virginia, for a minister for their new church at Woodstock, the 
county-town of Dunmore, they asking that his son might be 
sent. This request was acceded to, and the young minister 
made his way beyond the Potomac, where he so conducted him- 
self as to insure his name ever being honorably preserved on the 
pages of history. We shall pass some interesting hours in this 



Father Muhlenberg's Letters to Zion Church. 85 

excellent man's company on his return to New Jersey, after 
exchanging his rector's gown for the blue and buff of a Conti- 
nental general. 

For several years following the loss of Peter Muhlenberg, 
Zion's pulpit appears to have been without an occupant, Father 
Muhlenberg continuing his oversight of the congregation. 
Repeated requests were made to the rector that he would send 
one of his two remaining sons to fill the office of "assistant minis- 
ter." While this desire was never gratified — at least to the 
extent of a residence of either for a continuous period — it is in 
evidence that Henry Ernst, the youngest, occasionally supplied 
the churches, and presided at regular vestry councils. His con- 
sent was at one time obtained to become the rector in place of 
his father, but the joint congregations of Philadelphia refused to 
release him from a prior engagement, and so the arrangement 
was not consummated. That, meanwhile, unsuccessful efforts 
were made to secure a minister is shown by the following letter 
of Father Muhlenberg addressed to Ehrenreich Moelich and his co- 
trustees. Our immigrant ancestor, Johannes, having by this time 
become a member of the congregation of that greater and eternal 
Zion, his eldest son had taken the sire's place among the fathers of 
the earthly church. As it is dated the year previous to the one in 
which Peter Muhlenberg severed his connection with the New 
Jersey congregations, it would seem that he was absent from his 
charge during some part of 1771. He may have been on a visit 
to the valley of Virginia, and evidently had already notified his 
parishioners that he intended to leave them. 

Worthy and Beloved Brethren : I received your dear letter of the 16th 
September from Bedminster, through the dear brother, Anthony Melick, and 
understand from it : 1st, That the majority of the members of St. Paul's church 
met on Wednesday and voted for Mr. Kuntze and Mr. Buscherch. 2nd, Now^as 
far as Mr. Kuntze is concerned, he thanks the dear brethren heartily, because 
they have been so good as to vote for him. It is not possible for him to accept 
the call, since the corporation of Philadelphia positively will not release him, 
neither can they let him go, nor will they, and he himself also before God has 
neither conviction nor desire to leave without a cause the congregation entrusted 
to him. 3rd, And because the beloved brethren have also voted for Mr. Busch- 
erch, and I have heard that Mr. Buscherch will preach next Sunday in New 
Germantown ; if then the Bedminster corporation thinks that Mr. Buscherch is 
strong and qualified enough to feed your three congregations, and the corporation 
of Zion's church, likewise, thinks and agrees with you, then can you ask him by 
chance if he is willing to accept a call from you or not. The congregations have. 



86 The Story of an Old Farm. 

indeed, a right to vote, nevertheless the question remains whether the preacher 
for whom tliey voted truly can accept the call, or will. For this time I don't 
know anything further to answer, except that I greet you all heartily and kiss 
you in Christ, who for the comfort of the Believers has promised " Look, I am 
with you every day, until the end of the world." I remain your old wellwisher 
and intercessor, Henry Muhlenberg. 

Philadelphia, 22 Sept., 1771. 

My next record of a shepherd to this Lutheran flock is that 
of William Anthony Graff, a native of Grunstadt in Rhenish 
Bavaria, and a graduate of the university of Gressen in Hesse- 
Darmstadt. This godly man came in 1775 and preached until 
his death, thirty-four years later, his memory being still pre- 
served as a precious heritage by the descendants of the fathers 
of Zion. His cei'tiflcate of ordination, dated in September, 1760, 
is in the handwriting of Father Muhlenberg, and it records in 
stately, scholastic Latin that he was called in that year to the 
charges of Hackensack and Ramapo, ''prefectures of New Jer- 
sey belonging to the kingdom of Great Britain." With those 
congregations he remained for fifteen years, until called to New 
Germantown. This certificate shows further that the newly- 
ordained one vows "to abhor all fanatical opinions, such as 
pontifical, anabaptist, sacramentarian and similar errors." And 
then to him is entrusted, with pious ceremony, '' the office of 
teaching the gospel and administering the sacraments according 
to the calling and rule prescribed in the Prophetic and Apostolic 
writings, w^hose sum is comprehended in the three Symbols, 
Apostolic, Nicene and Athanasian, — in the Augsburg confession 
presented to the Emperor Charles V. in the year 1530, and in 
the Apology of the same — likewise in the smaller and larger 
catechisms of Dn. Dr. Luther, and in the articles to which signa- 
tures were appended in the assembly of Schmalcald." The 
whole closes with the handsome signatures and seals of 

Caroi.us Magnus Wrangel, 
S. S. Theol. Doctor Concionator Aulic. 
Ord. Suecorum Regis & Ecclesiarum, 
SuEco Luther-in America Praepositus. 

Henricus Muhi>enberg. 
Ministeru-Germanico 

LUTHERANI PrAESES ET 

Senior. 



Pastor Graff's Flourishing Congregation. 87 

The first signature, with its appended title, may be translated: 
Charles Magnus Wrangel, Doctor of Sacred Theology, Regular 
Court Preacher to the King of Sweden, and Head of the Swed- 
ish Lutheran Churches in America. 

About the time of the coming of Pastor Graflf we may con- 
clude that this Lutheran congregation was in a flourishing condi- 
tion. Before me lies an original list of the communicants of the 
church, dated the second of May, 1773, showing their number 
to have been ninety. It is in the handwriting of the elder 
Muhlenberg, and the names present a singular mixture of Ger- 
man, Latin and English spelling. Among them are to be found, 
Ehrenr Moelich, evidently intended for Aaron Moelich, the first 
name standing for Ehrenreich ; his wife is set down as Charlotta; 
Jonas Moelich; Christian Meelich; Mr. Anthony Meelich, n fr. 
Eleonora ; Mr. Balthas Pickel ; Mr. Jacob Klein, n fr. 
Euphronica; Gottfried fein n fr. Magdelena; Marcus Koenig, n fr. 
Elisabeth ; Joh. Appelman, n fr. Ursula Magdal ; Mr. Thomas 
van Busshkerk, n fr., Esther ; Frau Miillerin Henrichs. The 
Christian Meelich mentioned above was the son of Johannes' 
cousin David ; Anthony Meelich, as we have already learned, 
was Johannes' nephew, while Frau Miillerin Henrichs was Maria 
Catherine, a sister of Anthony at Tunis, who, in 1755, 
became the wife of Joh. Henry MiiUer — Anglice, Miller. 
Her husband emigrated from Germany in 1750, and 
three years later settled near New Germantown, where he 
became a valued citizen, being for thirty-four years the clerk of 
the township. Although a devoted Christian, he was of the 
German Reformed persuasion, consequently we do not find his 
name on Zion communion lists, where that of his wife for a num- 
ber of years frequently appears. Eventually she proved a wan- 
dering sheep and strayed from the Lutheran flock — the church 
of her forefathers. In the year 1782 a Methodist minister 
arrived in Tewksbury who secured the good-wiU of her brother, 
Tunis — then a church warden — with whom he lodged. Among 
the few persons that he succeeded in converting to the new, 
and generally considered heterodox, faith, was his host's 
sister. This did not accord with the views of her husband, 
Henry Miller, who, thereupon, interviewed the missionary, and 
reported the result in writing to his wife's pastor, Mr. Graff, 



88 The Story of an Old Farm. 

declaring that he found the newcomers religious beliefs to be 
"scandalous and despicable of the church." On the following 
Sunday, the rector, from the pulpit, denounced the itinerant as 
a "proselyting upstart." This brought Tunis Melick to his feet 
in defence of his guest, and he angrily interrupted Mr. OraflF, 
being joined in his protest by Godfrey Rinehart, another church- 
warden. A great commotion was produced in the congregation, 
and the two malcontents were subsequently tried and deposed 
from the vestry. Tunis Melick and his wife adhered to the new 
faith, and with a few others stemmed the current of opposition, 
until their perseverance was finally rewarded by the establish- 
ment of a Methodist congregation, in which their descendants 
have been prominent to this day. 

Catherine Miller was much beloved, and was long remembered 
in Tewksbury because of the impress made by her strong char- 
acter and deeply religious nature upon the people among whom 
she spent her life. John Fine, who died in 1861 at the age of 
eighty-two, and who himself was as modest and humble as he was 
good, used to tell that in his boyhood he was indentured for a 
term of years to Henry Miller. He soon found his master's wife 
to be not only very pious, but exceedingly strict. She treated 
him well, but insisted that he should comprehend his duties and 
perform them all in their proper time and order. On one occa- 
sion, being seriously punished for running the milch cows from 
the field, he was inclined to resent the whipping, and did revenge 
himself by some ugly boyish trick. "In after years I regretted 
it very much," said the good old man, " and more especially did 
I grieve over it, when, upon the death of Mother Miller, it was 
discovered that she had knelt so often and so long in secret 
prayer that ^callusses^ had grown upon her knees, resembling 
those upon the hand of a common working-man." Henry Miller 
upon the death of his wife thus recorded the event in his family 
Bible : " 1807. To-day the 22nd Jan.: at 1 2 o'clock noon, has my 
dear wife Maria Catherina fallen peacefully asleep in the Lord, 
and will be buried on the 25th day. After we have lived fifty- 
one years, nine months and three weeks together in the Holy 
estate of matrimony. And she is the first one who has died in 
ray house. May the dear God prepare us who are left behind 
to follow piously after, for the sake of his dear Son, Jesus Christ, 



Character and Appearance of Father Graff. 8& 

Amen." " Grood old Father Fine," who has preserved to us the 
story of Catherine Miller's habit of prayer, seems to have reached 
a height of spirituality unattainable by his contemporaries, and 
he left a name that stands as a synonym for Christian piety in 
all the Tewksbury region He was a man of '' wise saws, sen- 
tentious apothegms and apposite anecdotes," and the tales, related 
by the village gossips of his biblical honesty, are the wonder of 
the present generation. He and his wife were early converts to 
Methodism, he being blessed with a help-mate as heavenly 
minded as himself. "Mother Fine" was renowned for sanctity, 
for charity, for every tender feeling. A clerical bull is asso- 
ciated with her name. An Irish minister said to her at a social 
meeting, " Sister Mother, please lead our devotions !" 

But these reminiscences are carrying us too far away from 
Pastor Graff, to whom we must return. At the time of his com- 
ing to Zion and St. Paul's he was in the prime of manhood, being 
about eight and forty years old. An interesting family, consist- 
ing of a wife and half a dozen children (of whom four were 
daughters), consitituted the whole of his worldly wealth — if we 
may except a traditional " roach-backed " horse, with riding 
equipments, and a certain weather-stained " shay" of a comically 
antique construction. Father Graff's parishioners delighted in 
his imposing appearance. He was very fond of the saddle, and 
wearing a three-cornered hat and military boots, was often to 
be seen astride of his faithful steed, riding between New German- 
town, Pluckamin, and on to Roxbury, where he also supplied a 
Lutheran pulpit. Mr. Graff's salary was to be the interest on 
the Pickel legacy (supposed to amount to sixty pounds), and 
sixty pounds more to be raised by contributions from the congre- 
gations of Pluckamin and Roxbury. For this the New German- 
town congregation was entitled to preaching twice monthly, while 
the lesser flocks were forced to be contented with Sunday visita- 
tions of once a month. He soon dropped from his official title 
" deputy," or " pro tem " as Father Muhlenberg, hearing of the 
excellent choice of the congregations, very willingly resigned the 
rectorship. 

Mr. Graff preached alternately in German and English, but 
his efforts to conquer the latter tongue were never entirely 
successful. It is said that to the end of life he persisted 



90 The Story of an Old Farm. 

in calling the village of his residence '' New >S'/mrrmantown," 
and that of the location of St. Paul's church " Blook-a-)>^ee/^." 
The story is told that once, when delivering a sermon on the 
temptation of Eve, the word, serpent, slipped his memory. Try 
hard as he would it continued to elude him. After an awkward 
hesitation and much endeavor he stammered out in broken 
English : '■^ Dot old — dot — dot old Tuyfel^ der shnake." The good 
rector may have been a little uncertain in his language, but there 
is no doubt that his virtues and attainments were of the most 
j^ositive character. All testimony is concurrent as to his having 
been a devoted, diligent and loving pastor, and a truly learned 
and pious man. Possessed of an eminently happy disposition he 
was esteemed and beloved by his people, both for the many 
amiable qualities of his personality, and for the faithful perform- 
ance of his pastoral duties. During the last four years of his 
life, age and infirmity seriously interfered with his public minis- 
trations. Children, however, were brought to his house for bap- 
tism, marriage rites were not considered complete without his 
blessing, and he even performed the last offices for the dead 
while supported in his tottering steps by dutiful and affectionate 
parishioners. We shall see him standing by Aaron Moelich's 
coffin within a few weeks of his own death. At last, on the thirty- 
first of May, in the year 1809, after days and nights of wearisome 
pain, his soul was gently released from its decaying tenement, 
and good old Father Graff's pastorate was over. At the north- 
east corner of the village church, which he so faithfully served 
for nearly thirty-four years, a plain, brown-stone slab marks his 
final resting place, and chronicles in simple language the span of 
his life. With Mr. Graff we will conclude the enumeration of 
Zion's ministers, for with him ends the line of those who bap- 
tized, married and buried the descendants of Johannes Moelich. 

Among the archives of the church are two interesting docu- 
ments bearing the signatures of our German ancestor. He spells 
the name " Molich ;" the diaeresis over the o, denoting the omission 
of the letter e. The first signature is attached to an obligation 
in which he was a co-signer with twelve other elders and dea- 
cons. It reads as follows ; 

Know all men by these Presence that We, to wit, I, Lorentz Kuloft's ; I, Jacob 
Shuppmann; I, Andreas Abel Sen.; I, Johannes Moelicli ; I, Adam Fiikeroth; I, 



ZioN Church Members from Bendokf. 91 

George Schwartz; I, Phillipp Weiss; I, David Moelich; I, Casper Hindersheidt ; 
I, Samuel Bernhard, signed [Barnhardt] ; I, Joseph Heriibekker; I, Jacob Klein, 
and I, Jacob Fasbiuder, at this time elders and deacons of the High Dutch 
Lutheran Congregation belonging to the Meeting house Called Zion in Lebanon, 
are held firmly bound in tlie name of the forsaid Congregation, and Meeting 
house unto Baltes Bickel of Reading-Taun in the County of Hunterdon and 
Province of New Jersey, his heirs etc, etc, unto the sum of Eighty Two Pounds, 
lawful Jersey money at Eight Shillings per ounce, to be paid etc. etc. Dated the 
Eighteenth day of December in the year of our Lord God, One Thousand Seven 
Hundred and Fifty. 

Of the thirteen elders and deacons, six, viz : Johannes and 
David Moelich, Fiikeroth, Weiss, Klein, and Fasbinder, signed 
in German character, two — Earnhardt and Hernbekker — signed 
in good plain English, while the remaining five were obliged to 
make their marks. It would seem the ancient congregation of 
the Evangelische Haupt-Kirche of Bendorf on the Rhine, con- 
tributed a number of officers and members to the " Honorable 
Corporation " of Zion church at New Germantown. We have 
already seen that Johannes, David, and Jonas Moelich, had been 
members of the German congregation, and now we find another 
of Zion's trustees, Jacob Fasbinder, to have been transferred 
from the parish on the Rhine. He was born in Bendorf in 1683, 
being the son of Jacob Fassbender, who migrated to that place 
from Homburg, and is named on the church register as a 
"rewfer," or military horsemen. Jacob Fassbender, the younger, 
was probably attracted to New Jersey, because of the number of 
his fellow-townsmen who had preceded him across the water. 
He was over sixty yeai's old before he emigrated, as he landed 
at Philadelphia from the ship Loyal Judith, James Cowil, master, 
on the second of September, 1743. Still another member of this 
New Jersey Lutheran congregation came from the Bendorf 
church — Gottfried Klein (Godfrey Kline). He was a son of 
Christian Klein, who, in 1733, stood godfather to Johannes' 
daughter, Marie Cathrine. I have not discovered any connec- 
tion between this Christian Klein and Johan Jacob Klein, who 
married Johannes' daughter, Veronica Gerdrutta. Christian's 
son, Godfrey, was the emigrant ancestor of another Hunterdon 
line of that name. Should further researches in the Bendorf 
parish register be made, it is not improbable that additional 
names would be found identical with those of the Hunterdon 
congregation. There is good reason for believing that this inter- 



92 The Story of an Old Farm. 

esting German church was the means of founding the New 
Jersey corporation. 

The second document on which the signature of Johannes 
appears is a faded, yellow, slightly torn, and much worn paper 
of the date of December 1st, 1757. It is a bond, written in 
German, for money borrowed in behalf of the congregation 
to be used in the erection of a parsonage on the glebe land. 
A stone dwelling was erected one mile and a half from New Ger- 
mantown, on the road to Lebanon. It has only recently disap- 
peared ; a gaping cellar choked with weeds and rubbish is all 
that is left to mark the spot where it stood. The musty, warped, 
leather-bound church-book, shows Johannes and David Moelich 
to have been appointed by the vestry a committee to superintend 
the building of this house. In the bond it is interesting to note 
their attempt to spell English words in a German fashion. It 
commences in this wise : 

Know all men by these Presence, that we, to wit, I, Davilrd Moelich in Riedens- 
Da'dn in Hiinder-daun, CailncH in the broVimcs of West new Jersey, and I, Johan- 
nes Moelich in Lebanon-Daiin. same Cailnli and brovurns. 

Johannes continued his connection with Zion church until his 
death in 1763. At a meeting of the vestry in the year 1756, 
it was resolved to erect a new sanctuary for the beneiit of the 
many members of the congregation living in the adjoining county, 
on the east. Consequently steps were taken for the erection of 
St. Paul's church in the .village of Pluckamin, in Bed minster 
township, Somerset county. The original subscription list, 
circulated at that time in order to raise the necessary funds, i& 
still in existence, and the appeal reads as follows : 

Bedminster, Ye 7 th Day of December, 1756. 

A Subscription For Raising a Sum of money For Building a Church In Bed- 
minster town. 

Whereas the members of the Lutheran Congregation In and near Bedminster 
town Being necessitated For a Place of Public Worship Tliink a Proper Place to 
Erect a House for To Worship God, and it is further agreed By us the Subscri- 
bers That one half of the Preaching, or Every other Sermon Preached By any 
minister Chosen the Said Lutheran Congregation Shall be in the English Lan- 
guage and the other in High Dutch. We, therefore, the underscribers, Do 
Promise To Pay or cause to be Paid The Sum or Sums annexed to our names for 
the uses above mentioned To any Person or Persons Chosen Cx)llectorof Said money 
by the said Congregation. Tlie Money is not To be paid until Said Church is a 
Building and the money wanted for that Use. We most Humbly would Desire 




w 




ai 




Q 




P^ 




(— 1 




*-^ 




y^ 


w 


1 


?^ 


r-i 


hH 


i—H 




>— J 




^ 


W 




m 


w 


H 




?^ 


H 


'i 


it! 


p-l 


Q 


p:! 


m 


Q 


(— » 


55 




W 


W 


W 


c 




^ 




<I1 




>- 




N 





St. Paul's Church at Pluckamin. 93 

the assistance of all our well Minded friends and neighbors That are well 
wishers for Promoting So Good a deseine To Be helpful to us and subscribe 
such a matter To this our undertaking which will be Accepted with Greatest 
Humility and thankfulness, and will be Attending to the advancement of ye 
Glory of God. 

Then follow the signatures of one hundred and thirty persons, 
many of them being members of the Presbyterian congregations 
of Lamington and Basking Ridge, and of the Dutch Reformed 
churches on the Raritan, and below. Among these names are 
those of Johannes Moelich, Marcus King, Jacob Eoff Sen., James 
Linn, Aaron Malick, Hendrick Van Arsdalen, John and George 
Teeple, Guisbert Sutfin, Abraham Montanyea and Mary Alex- 
ander. The total amount subscribed was about three himdred 
and fifty pounds. The church was built on land donated by 
Jacob Eo£F, senior; it stood until early in this century when it 
was taken down, its abuse during the Revolutionary war having 
so weakened the walls as to have rendered them dangerous. Its 
location was a little southeast of the present Presbyterian 
church; the burial ground of that denomination originally sur- 
rounded the edifice of St. Paul's, and in it are interred 
many members of that Lutheran flock, including Johannes 
Moelich and his son, Aaron. Among the heir-looms of the "Old 
Stone House is the altar cloth of this church, which is pre- 
served as an interesting relic of the days of the family's German 
ancestry. 

With the turn of the century the Lutherans of Bedminster 
had in numbers become a feeble folk, and by the year 1806 St. 
Paul's communion appears to have fallen into a moribund condi- 
tion. This is shown by the original draft, now before me, in 
the handwriting of Pastor Grafi", of the will of John Appelman, 
dated in that year. The testator must have died an old man, as 
in 1767 he was elected a vestryman of this church "in 
Bedminster town," with Aaron Malick, Mark King, Peter 
Melick, Jacob Eoff, David King and others. This instrument, 
which constitutes Aaron's son, Daniel, one of the executors, 
recites : 

It always has been my will and Intention since Providence gave to me no 
Heirs of my Body, to give and make a certain sum in my Last Will for the Best 
of our Lutheran church at Pluckamin to uphold our holy Religion, but since by 
all human appearance our particular Denomination in Pluckamin as Lutheran 



94 The Story of an Old Farm. 

will soon lose ground on account of the smallness of its Professors, it is, there- 
fore, now my Will and Intention, not to Limit the proposed sum of One hundred 
Pounds, intended to our church at Pluckainin only, but to give myne assist- 
ance in general towards upholding our lioly Religion under the assistance of a 
merciful God in all our united Lutheran churches in these Parts * * * * 

These ancient echoes of the walls of Zion are carrying us on 
mach too fast. We must return to the dates appropriate to the 
regular progression of events in the story of our ancestor's life. 
Before doing so, however, we will make one final reference to 
these interesting Lutheran congregations. In the royal charter 
granted by George III. in 17G7, ''to the Rector, Church Wardens 
and Vestrymen of the united Churches of Zion and St. Paid," the 
following names appear as its petitioners; Lucas Dipple, David 
King, Jacob EoflF, John Appelman, Leonard Streit, Conrad 
Meizner, Aaron Malick, Jacob Volser, Mark King, Christofer 
Teeple and John Teeple, all being residents of the townships of 
Bridgewater, Bedminster and Bernards, in Somerset county. It 
will be seen that Johannes always adhered to the German spell- 
ing of his name. As is shown by the St. Paul's subscription list 
as well as by the petition for the charter, his oldest son, who had 
made his advent in this country as "Ehrenreich Moelich," now 
appears with his name anglicized to "Aaron Malick." In all 
the letters, bonds and papers in my possession bearing his signa- 
ture the name is spelled as above. The same may be said of his 
brother, Andrew. Johannes, his sons and their posterity have 
written their names with varied spelling ; their signatures 
appear as Moelich, Melich, Malick, Melegh, Meelick, Mellick 
and Melick. As late as 1805, old pastor Graff of Zion church 
spelled it in the old book of record, Moelich, while away back in 
1770 the Rev. Peter Muhlenberg — the afterwards distinguished 
Revolutionary general — wrote the name in the same old book as 
Melick. As Shakespeare seems to have been a little uncertain 
in the spelling of his patronymic, we may excuse the same 
doubts in the early members of this old family during the transi- 
tional period from the German to the American. Even at this 
late day there is no uniformity in the spelling, as it is found in 
New York and New Jersey, MeUick, Malick and IMelick, and in 
Pennsylvania Moelich, Malick and Melick, though in this latter 
state the accent is often placed on the first syllable and the divi- 
sion is made between the 1 and i, thus giving it the sound as if 



Changes in Johannes' Family. 95 

spelled with two Vs. Rector GraiF, referred to above, judging 
from the church register, was often at a loss as to the spelling 
of his own cognomen. It is written Graff, Graf, Graaff and 
Graaf. 

The year 1751 approaches — one of the most important, per- 
haps, in the family annals, as it is the one in which Johannes 
finally decided where to plant the permanent homestead. Mean- 
while let us consider the changes that have taken place in his 
flock since the arrival in America. Aaron, the oldest son — the 
great-grandfather of the writer — has grown to be a man of 
twenty-six years and is still unmarried. Veronica Gerdrutta 
(Fanny), who is now twenty years old, as we have seen, has 
married her father's partner, Jacob Kline, who was born in Ger- 
many on the sixth of March, 1714. Their first child John 
William is now beginning to walk and talk, having been born 
on the fifth of January, 1750. Johannes' second son Andrew 
has reached majority, while his second daughter Maria is just 
budding into womanhood, being eighteen years old. Since 
reaching America two*sons have been born — Philip on the ninth 
of October, 1736, and Peter on the fifth of December, 1739. 




CHAPTER VIII. 

Purchase of the '■'■Old Farm^'' in 1751 — The Title, and Early 
Neiv Jersey History. 

And now the current of our history changes. The stream that 
has heretofore taken wild leaps from America to Europe, from 
Germany to Pennsylvania, will for a time flow peacefully 
between pastoral banks, amid the pleasant vales and gently 
swelling hills of East Jersey. Later on, when England has let 
loose the dogs of war upon her American subjects, it will rush 
through wild and turbulent scenes. But for some years to come 
this little river of narration will flow tranquilly in quiet haunts, 
skirting broad meadow spaces, meandering through retired vil- 
lages, and turning the wheels of busy mills seated in deep val- 
leys ; telling the pleasant story, as it flows, of old Bedmins ter, 
and its transformation from a wilderness — the home of bear, deer 
and primitive settler — to a rich agricultural country, peopled by 
a well-ordered and prosperous community. 

Since the arrival of Johannes in New Jersey he had been in 
search of a location that would meet all the requirements of a 
permanent home. His needs were not confined to good agricul- 
tural lands ; a water power was also desired, advantageously 
situated for establishing a tannery. In 1751 Bedminster town- 
ship in vSomerset county was decided upon as his future place 
of residence. On the first of November in that year he pur- 
chased of George Leslie of Perth Amboy three hundred and 
sixty-seven acres of wild or forest land, having a front of about 
three-quarters of a mile on the north branch of the Raritan river. 
The following is the description shown in the deed : 

Beginning at the Easter most corner of Daniel Axtell's land, where it touches 
Peapack river, below a log house that John Bun! now lives in. Thence running 



The Original Boundary of the Farm. 97 

South, seventy-three degrees West, along the said Axtell's line, sixty chains to a 
corner of the land William Hoagland now possesses, belonging unto the said 
George Leslie. Thence North, forty-eight chains. Thence South, seventy-six 
degrees. West forty -nine chains. Thence North and by East, thirty-two chains. 
Thence North, seventy-six degrees, East fifty-nine chains to Lawrence's brook. 
Thence down the said brook and Peapack river to the first mentioned place of 
beginning. Bounded East by the said river, Southerly by said Axtell's land, 
and on all the other sides by the land belonging unto the said George Leslie. 

The confines of the property as relating to roads and adjoin- 
ing owners nowadays would be defined as follows : The descrip- 
tion commences at a point where the Mine brook, or Lamington 
road, crosses the north branch of the Raritan, which river was 
the eastern boundary of the estate. From there the line followed 
the centre of this road to a point in the west boundary of the 
touse-lot of Clark D. Todd, in the village of the Lesser Cross 
Roads (Bedminster). Thence, northerly, to a hickory tree stand- 
ing on the side of the Peapack road, near the gate, or entrance, 
to what was lately the homestead farm of Abram D. Huff. 
Thence along this road to the Holland road, where, turning 
west, the line followed the latter road to the southwest corner of 
the Opie Farm. Here the Holland road bears north of west, 
but the line continued westerly, on the left of the highway, to a 
corner of lands, now or late of Henry Woods. Thence north- 
erly, following Woods' line, and crossing the Holland road, it 
extended twenty-one hundred and twelve feet to a comer of land, 
now or late of Edward Hight. Thence, easterly, thirty-eight 
hundred and ninety-four feet to a point in the Peapack brook 
near the head of Schomp's mill-pond, from where the line con- 
tinued down the brook and the north branch of the Raritan 
river to the place of beginning. By the above it will be seen 
that the original purchase, in addition to the one hundred and 
forty acres now constituting the farm, embraced so much 
of the village of Bedminster as lies north of the Lamington road ; 
a portion of the Huff farm on the Peapack road ; and all of the 
Opie, and a portion of the Hight and Woods farms on the Hol- 
land road. 

The price paid for this property was '' seven hundred and fifty- 
four pounds current money of the province, at eight shillings per 
ounce." This last clause of the consideration materially modifies 
the cost of the land. Money at eight shillings to the ounce meant 
7 



98 The Story of an Old Farm. 

a considerable depreciation from the standard values. In the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries English silver was coined 
on the basis of five shillings and two pence per ounce. The sil- 
ver coin mostly in use in the American colonies was the Spanish 
milled dollar or " piece of eight," which the English mint found 
to be worth four shillings and six pence sterling, or one pound 
equalling four dollars and forty-four and four-ninths cents. This 
was established as the standard relative value. But early in 
the eighteenth century the weight and quality of the Spanish 
milled dollar did not continue to realize this ratio. The circula- 
tion of clipped and inferior coins rapidly depreciated all cur- 
rency values, hence, as Professor Sumner of Yale college, says, 
" Any such rating as eight shillings to the ounce was only one 
stage in the various grades of depreciation ; it was a conven- 
tional attempt to compromise on a standard of weight allowing 
some depreciation." This rating consequently reduced the pound 
sterling from four dollars and forty-four and four-ninths cents to 
three dollars and fourteen and one-quarter cents. Thus we find 
that the actual consideration for the purchase of the Bedminster 
land was twenty-three hundred and sixty-nine dollars and forty- 
four cents, or about six dollars and forty-five cents an acre. 

With Johannes' acquisition of this property, issues may be 
said to be joined between the reader and the writer. The story 
of the " Old Farm " will now commence for we have at last 
reached the source of the narrative. Perhaps it will interest some 
of Johannes' posterity to learn something of the title to this little 
portion of mother earth, from which so many members of the family 
have been nurtured. It is readily told, as, previous to the Leslie 
conveyance, the holders of the land had been but few. The 
Indians, of course, as far as Europeans know, were the first — the 
Naraticongs, a clan of the Lenni-Lenape, or Delawares, a branch 
of the great Algonquin family. All the lands of New Jersey at 
the time of the first settlement by the whites were vested by 
right of occupation and possession in these aborigines. The 
country lying between the Hudson and the Lenni-WihitfucJc, as 
they called the Delaware river, was named by them, " Scheyichhi." 
Whether these natives were, like the trees, indigenous to the. 
soil, or themselves owned the land as conquerors of a dispossessed 
race, is a vexed question ; as is also that other question which 



The Raritan Indians. 99 

has been debated for so many years, whether Indians are des- 
cended from the Jews, the Welsh, the Mongols or the Malays. 
The Algonquins embraced about a quarter of a million souls j 
they were divided into many tribes, among which were the 
Mohigans, Delawares, Micmacs, Illinois, Monseys, Chippewas, 
Ottawas, Pottawatamies, Sacs, Foxes and Miamis. They occu- 
pied much of the country lying between Chesapeake bay and 
the St. Lawrence river, almost surrounding their hereditary 
enemies, the Huron-Iroquois family. These latter embraced the 
Five Nations of New York, the Hurons of Upper Canada, and 
the Tuscaroras of North Carolina, who had joined the confeder- 
ated tribes. 

The clan of the Delawares roaming the country north of 
the Raritan, as has been said, were the NaraticongSj though 
the whites gave them the name of the river along which 
they were located. Their dress was a blanket, or skin, thrown 
over the shoulders, deer-skin fastened with thongs about the legs, 
and the feet covered with moccasins of the same material, so 
dressed as to be soft and pliable, being ornamented with quills 
and wampum beads. At the time of the settlement of Bedmin- 
ster there were comparatively few natives in that part of the prov- 
ince ; those remaining were of a friendly character, and proved 
of great service to the settlers in supplying them with game, 
skins and furs. The haunts of the tribe had been originally on 
the head waters of the Raritan, which O'Callaghan's History of 
New Netherlands describes as '' a rich and fertile valley situated 
between two high mountains, some distance the one from the 
other, through which flowed a fresh-water river that disem- 
boughed in the Navesink Bay." O'Callaghan further states that 
some thirty years after the Raritans were first known to 
Europeans their provisions were destroyed by a freshet, and they 
were repeatedly harrassed by the Sankhicans. Consequently 
they moved farther down the river, making a treaty of amity 
with the Dutch, which they preserved even when the other 
tribes were retaliating for the massacre of the Indians on the 
west bank of the Hudson. They established their principal 
seat where is now Piscataway, in Middlesex county, and here 
were living their two chiefs, Canackawack and Thingorawis, 
when, in 1677, they conveyed to the whites their lands in that 
vicinity. 

LOFC. 



100 Tiic Story of an Old Farm. 

That at one time the savages must have been in plenteous 
numbers in the Bedminster neighborhood is shown by the traces 
of them still to be found. The "Old Farm" has produced a 
generous crop of stone implements and arrow-heads planted by 
the aborigines in ante-European days. It is Hawthorne who 
writes of the " exquisite delight of picking up for one's self an 
arrow-head that was dropped centuries ago and has never been 
handled since, and which we thus receive directly from the 
hands of the red hunter. Such an incident builds up again the 
Indian village and its encircling forest, and recalls the painted 
chief, the squaws, and the children sporting among the wigwams, 
while the little wind-rocked papoose swings from the branch of 
a tree." All this, you will say, is quite foreign to the subject ! 
Yes, you are right ! but, much earlier in these pages, you must 
have learned that your scribe has a vagrant fancy — a mind that 
is easily seduced from the dry detail of a chain of title by the 
picture of a dusky Indian, with wampum belt and feathered 
crest, lurking beneath the shadows of the grand congregation of 
trees of primitive Bedminster. 

Of the extinguishment of the claims of the red men, it is 
necessary to say but little. The modes of procedure in such 
cases were much the same in all portions of the colonies. Gen- 
erally the usual number of blankets, jugs of rum, strings of 
wampum, guns and handfuls of powder were exchanged for 
treaties and deeds which conveyed great areas of territory. In 
New Jersey the early settlers, before acquiring the legal title to 
their purchases, were obliged to satisfy the claims of the natives. 
The Indian title to the territory which embraced the "Old 
Farm" was conveyed to John Johnstone and George Willocks on 
the twenty-ninth of October, 1701, by Tallquapie, Nicolas and 
Elalie. The deed called for thirty-one hundred acres, but on 
being surveyed the area conveyed was found to contain over 
ten thousand, as it included all the land Ij'ing between the north 
branch of the Raritan and the Lamington rivers, and a point 
above the Morris county line and the crest of the first mountain 
below Pluckamin ; — but more of this hereafter. According to 
Doctor Abraham ]\Iessler, Somerset's first historian, the earliest 
Indian sale in the county of lands lying north of Bound 
Brook was in 1683. Among the papers of the late Ralph 



The Indian Conference at Easton. 101 

Voorhees is ca deed dated in 1723, made by Coion, Nutomus 
and Quaton, three Delawares. It conveyed two hundred acres 
of land lying near the Millstone river — part of the Peter Sonmans 
tract — and is thought to be the last Indian conveyance. 

As the purchases from the natives multiplied they gave rise 
to complications and disputes. In addition, during the French 
wars the agents of Louis XV. intrigued with the Indians, caus- 
ing violent outbreaks in Pennsylvania and exciting ferment 
among the natives of northern New Jersey. The authorities 
deemed it expedient to appoint commissioners to confer with the 
tribes in order to ascertain and remove aU causes of discontent. 
A series of conferences were held, extending from 1756 to 1758, 
at Crosswicks, Burlington and Easton, the final one being held at 
the last place, when Governor Bernard, together with the lieuten- 
ant-governor of Pennsylvania and five commissioners, met in 
convention five hundred and seven Indian delegates from four- 
teen different tribes. This resulted in conveyances being made 
which it was supposed entirely freed and discharged the prov- 
ince from all native claims. In 1832, however, the New Jer- 
sey legislature appropriated two thousand dollars to pay forty 
Indians — the last remnant of their tribe — for a claim they made 
as to their hunting and fishing rights, which they considered had 
not been included in the transfer at Easton. The " Colonial 
History of New Jersey" bears testimony to the fact of there 
always having been the most equitable dealings between the Jer- 
sey people and the Indians. The Six Nations, at a meeting 
held for the purpose of confirming the acts of the Easton confer- 
ence, honored the governor of the province by calling him 
Sagorighweyoghsta, or the " Great Arbiter or Doer of Jus- 
tice." The people of Somerset — the descendants of its first 
settlers — have always reflected with much pride on their clean 
and wholesome record in all' Indian transactions. They delight 
in remembering the words of one of their county's most gifted 
sons, Samuel L. Southard, uttered before the legislature, 
on the occasion of the purchase of the native hunting and 
fishing rights, before referred to. ''It is a proud fact in the 
history of New Jersey," said the senator, " that every foot of her 
soil has been obtained from the Indians by fair and voluntary 
purchase and transfer — a fact that no other state of the Union, 
not even the land which bears the name of Penn, can boast of." 



102 The Story of an Old Farm. 

On this occasion the red men were respresented by Shawrisk- 
Jiekung, or Wilted Grass, a Delaware Indian of pure native 
blood. He was a graduate of Princeton college, having been 
educated at the expense of the Scotch Missionary society, which 
had given him the name of Bartholomew S. Calvin. At the age 
of twenty-three he entered the Continental army to fight for 
independence, and at the time he presented to the legislature the 
petition for pay for the Indian fishing rights, he was upwards of 
eighty years old. In advocating the claim of his people he 
warmly indorsed the just tribute paid to the state by Mr. South- 
ard. The aged Indian closed his address with the following 
words, testifying to the honorable policy and actions which had 
distinguished the people of New Jersey in all their treatment of 
and dealings with the aborigines : 

"Not a drop of our blood have you spilled in battle;* not an 
acre of our land have you taken but by our consent. These facts 
speak for themselves and need no comment. They place the 
character of New Jersey in bold relief and bright example to 
those states within whose territorial limits our brethren stiU 
remain. Nothing save benisons can fall upon her from the lips 
of a Lenni-Lcnajw. There may be some who would despise an 
Indian benediction ; but when I return to my people and make 
known to them the result of my mission, the ear of the Great 
Sovereign of the Universe, which is still open to our cry, will be 
penetrated with our invocation of blessings upon the generous 
sons of New Jersey." 

The manner of the white man's acquiring possession of and 
title to lands in New Jersey has been often and variously told ; 
it is always an interesting story. All historians agree in naming 
Friday, the fourth of September, 1609, as being the day on which 
New Jersey soil was first pressed by the feet of Europeans. On 
the preceding day Hcnrick Hudson, in his little Dutch '^ Vhe- 
hoat" the *' Half Moon," entered the Lower bay, and the next 

*Calvin's statement that not a drop of Indian blood had been spilled in battles 
with Jerseymen is almost, if not literally, true. In the early days of the Dutch 
occupation of New Amsterdam there were individual instances of murders of 
whites and Indians, and a few skirmishes took place on the banks of the Hudson 
and Delaware between natives and traders. But no state of war ever existed 
between the English colonists and the New Jersey Indians. So states Samuel 
AUinson — an excellent authority. 



The Fiest European's Grave in New Jersey. 103 

day, dropping anchor in the Horse Shoe, in four and a half 
fathoms of water and two cable lengths from the Monmouth 
beach, sent some of his men on shore to discover what manner of 
men were the natives, and whether they were kindly disposed. 
When the crew landed they saw '^a, great store of men, women 
and children who gave them some tobacco and some dried cur- 
rants." The natives were dressed *'some in mantles of feathers 
and some in skins of diverse sorts of good furres. They had 
red copper tobacco pipes, and other things of copper they did 
wear about their necks." 

When the Half Moon again crossed the bar, her sails spread- 
ing for the homeward voyage, she left one of her company lying 
at the foot of a stunted cedar on Sandy Hook, filling the first 
white man's grave in New Jersey. John Coleman, with four 
shipmates, on the sixth of September explored the harbor in a 
small boat. Penetrating " two leagues to an open sea" (Newark 
bay), he reported that the bordering lands " were as pleasant 
with Grasse and Flowers and goodly Trees as any they had 
scene, and very sweet smells came from them." While return- 
ing, the fateful arrow of a treacherous red man ended Coleman's 
voyaging for this world. And now, after nearly three centuries, 
the miniature waves of the Lower bay are still sobbing on their 
yellow sands lullabies to the lonely sleeper of this pioneer grave, 
while on the outer beach the Atlantic rollers sound eternal 
requiems. The Hollanders on learning of this fair country 
dispatched other vessels to America, and by the year 1620 had 
made settlements in New Jersey at the mouth of the Hudson 
river, and were soon in peaceful possession, and for forty-three 
years occupied what is now New York and New Jersey, under 
the title of New Netherlands. After establishing New Amsterdam 
on Manhattan Island, the Dutch soon made their way westward, 
and to some extent occupied what is now known as the counties 
of Hudson, Bergen, Essex, Monmouth and Middlesex. It is 
believed, however, that earlier than the year 1681 there were 
in Somerset county no permanent inhabitants. 

All of this time the English claimed title to this portion of 
North America, resting their right on the voyage of the Cabots, 
who in 1497-8, sailed along the coast from New Foundland to 
Florida. Under the English law, discovery and conquest 



104 The Story of an Old Fahm. 

secured to the British Crown title to all heathen and uncivilized 
countries. In the year 1664 the English expelled the Dutch 
government from New Netherlands. Having conquered the 
country, the king's claim now rested, not only on discovery, but 
by right of conquest as well. James, Duke of York, received 
from his royal brother, Charles II., on the twelfth of March, 
1664, a patent for an area of territory which included what is 
now New Jersey. He took immediate possession, thus establish- 
ing the first link in a chain of title emanating directly from the 
King of England. The duke's grant conveyed not only prop- 
erty but the powers of government, and, as said Courtlandt 
Parker in his address at the bi-centennial celebration of the 
Proprietors of East New Jersey, in 1884, " No other title to the 
soil of New Jersey than his was ever recognized by the law." 

The Duke of York not long after this, on the twenty-fourth 
of June, conveyed that portion of the land included within the 
present boundaries of New Jersey, together with the accompany- 
ing powers of government, to John, Lord Berkeley, Baron of Strat- 
ton,and to Sir George Carteret, of Saltrum in Devon. The nominal 
consideration was ten shillings, and an annual rent of one pep- 
percorn, to be paid on the day of the nativity of St. John 
the Baptist, if legally demanded. The true incentive for the 
conveyance was the desire to reward the grantees for their dis- 
tinguished loyalty during the civil war. The territory was 
named Nova Cesarea, or New Jersey, in honor of Cartaret who, 
while governor of the channel-island of Jersey, had defended it 
valiantly against the parliament soldiers. He was the last com- 
mander within the circuit of the British Isles to lower the royal 
standard. Sir John Berkeley had been an exile with Charles 
II., and was raised to the peerage on the restoration. The word 
Jersey is a corruption of " Czar's-ey,^^ or " Cceser's-ey,''^ meaning 
the island of Csesar. It was intended that Nova Cesarea should 
be properly the title, but, as the population of the province 
increased, the people preferred its translated name rather than 
the classical appellation. At the time the duke transferred New 
Jersey to these noblemen he had but a slender acquaintance 
with the value of what he called his " plantations," but it was 
soon made known to him that his act had been one of haste and 
improvidence. Governor Nicolls, who was already representing^ 



The Origin of New Jersey's Name. 105 

him on this side of the water, remonstrated warmly with the 
duke against the cession of so important a portion of his Ameri- 
can possessions. So the king and his brother at once bestirred 
themselves in an endeavor to remedy the error. Lord Berkeley, 
a victim to the variable moods of princes, was already out of 
favor and office. In order to restore himself to the good graces 
of his royal masters, he readily acceded to a proposition to sur- 
render New Jersey in exchange for a patent of Delaware terri- 
tory ; he also visited Sir George Carteret, who was then in 
Ireland as lord treasurer, and prevailed upon him to do the same* 
The proposed exchange was all but completed, when some ugly 
questions arose between the Duke of York and Lord Baltimore 
as to priority of title to the Delaware lands; consequently, the 
transfer of New Jersey to the duke was not consummated. Had 
this been done there is every reason to believe that at present 
the state of New York would include that of New Jersey. 

In August, 1665, there arrived in the Kills the ship "Philip," 
having on board several families, and Philip de Carteret, 
Seigneur of the Manor of La Hogue, in the parish of St. Peter, 
Jersey, who bore the commission of the owners as governor of 
the province. The baronet, Sir George, and Philip were fourth 
cousins, being the great-grandsons, respectively, of Edward and 
Richard, sons of Philip de Carteret, Seigneur of St. Ouen, Island 
of Jersey, who died in 1500.* The new governor landed at 
what is now Elizabeth, where he established his home and capi- 
tal, naming the place in honor of the Lady Elizabeth, wife of his 
cousin. Sir George Carteret. This gentlewoman, the good god- 
mother of one of New Jersey's most ancient towns, though living 
in a profligate court, was possessed of rare virtues. Pepys, in. 
his diary of 1660, bears testimony that " she cries out against 
the vices of the court, and how they are going to set up plays^ 
already. She do much cry out upon these things, and that which 
she believes will undo the whole nation." This was the third 

* Governor Philip Carteret, in 1681, married Elizabeth, the daughter of 
Richard Smith, of Sraithtown, Long Island, and widow of Captain William Law- 
rence, of Fews Neck, Long Island. He built a large white house on Elizabeth 
creek, in the centre of the present city of Elizabeth, in which he died in 1682. 
His widow, in 1685, married Colonel Richard Townley, a leading citizen of Eliz- 
abethtown, who subsequently sold the governor's house to Peter Schuyler, who 
converted it into the " Ship " tavern. 



106 The Story of an Old Farm. 

settlement made in New Jersey, and the first by the English. 
The statement has frequently been made that before the found- 
ing of Bergen, in 1618, by the Dutch and Scandanavians, a 
Turkish family named Houghubot had settled at Turkey, now 
New Providence, in Union county. This story has no historical 
foundation. The fact remains that the claims of Elizabeth for 
being thefirst English-speaking settlement in the state have never 
been refuted. 

When Governor Carteret landed he found on the site of his 
new capital four families, as the nucleus of a population. These 
people claimed title to the land they occupied. In the previous 
year a large area of territory had been purchased from Staten 
Island Indians by some. Long Islanders. Governor Nicolls, act- 
ing as the deputy of the Duke of York, patented, in December, 
1664, this Indian purchase to John Ogden, Luke Watson and 
their associates, eighty in all. At the time of the governor's 
issuing this grant he had no knowledge of the duke's having 
divested himself of all rights to the lands in question by the con- 
veyance to Berkeley and Carteret. There is abundant evidence 
that Governor Carteret, on discovering that Nicolls had patented 
so valuable a portion of his principals' domain, was greatly at a 
loss what course to pursue. At first, it appears that to some 
extent he conceded to these prior settlers their rights under the 
grant, and, unhappily for the future comfort of himself and 
his grantees, attempted to disarm opposition by following 
a conciliatoi-y course. In furtherance of this policy, before 
1666 he purchased, individually, John Bailey's interest in the 
patent, and acted in concert with the other owners. But event- 
ually the lords-proprietors refused to recognize that they had 
any rights in the premises, claiming that the grant by Nicolls 
was void and of no avail, as it was impossible that he, acting as 
deputy, could pass a title that no longer vested in the duke. 
This grant has become^ historically known as the Elizabethtown 
patent. The claims of Berkeley and Carteret and their succes- 
sors came frequently in conflict with those of the Elizabethtown 
associates and their assigns, giving rise to legal commotions that 
continued until the Revolution. The history of these complex- 
ities is embalmed in a suit, instituted on the thirteenth of April, 
1745, by the Earl of Stair and others against '^Benjamin Bond 



The ''Concessions and Agreements." 107 

and some other Persons of Elizabefchtown." The bill filed at that 
time in Chancery made a voluminous document, which was pub- 
lished by James Parker in 1747, and, familiarly known as "The 
Elizabethtown Bill in Chancery," is to be found in the library of 
the New Jersey Historical Society. 

The recipients of this princely gift of New Jersey from the 
merry King Charles, and his more churchly but none the less 
vicious brother, James, soon found that to give value to their 
estate it was necessary to secure inhabitants. In the autumn of 
1665, through their representative, Philip Carteret, the newly- 
arrived governor, they wisely dispatched agents into New Eng- 
land, who published what was known as the "Concessions and 
Agreements of the Lords-Proprietors." These publications, by 
their liberal inducements, such as property in estates and liberty 
in religion, resulted in quite a migration to New Jersey. The 
agreements as to lands were very advantageous to settlers. They 
stipulated that the area of the province should be divided into 
parcels of from twenty-one hundred to twenty-one thousand 
acres. These plots were to be subdivided into seven parts, one 
of which was to be reserved for the lords-proprietors, while the 
remaining six-sevenths of each plot were to be held for distribu- 
tion, free of cost except quit-rents, among such persons as 
might come to occupy and plant the same. These latter were 
called headlands, and the fundamental rule by which they might 
be acquired was in this wise: all persons arriving in the pro- 
vince within a certain limited time were entitled to receive 
grants for a stipulated number of acres, paying to Berkeley and 
Carteret a yearly quit-rent of a half-penny per acre. The quan- 
tity of land to be granted to settlers depended upon the time of 
their coming, the size of their families and the number of people 
they brought with them, either as free servants, indented ser- 
vants, or slaves : the number of acres per head varied from 
thirty to one hundred and fifty. 

The immediate result of the publication of these " Concessions" 
in New England was the advent of people who established three 
important settlements in New Jersey. Among those who 
removed to the province in response to this invitation were John 
Martin, Charles Gilman, Hugh Dun and Hopewell Hull. J\[ak- 
ing their way westward, along the Indian path that stretched 



108 The Story of an Old Farm. 

from Elizabethtown-point to the Delaware, they reached an 
attractive spot on the high levels bordering the Raritan, where a 
few log huts had already been erected on the site of an old native 
village. Being pleased with the locality, they applied for, and 
received on the eighteenth of December, 166G, a grant for a 
large area of territory. To this point they brought their own 
and numerous other families from Piscataqua, in the province of 
Massachusetts — now Maine, — of which the name, Piscataway, is 
a corruption. Of this place, more, hereafter. 

Another consequence of the distribution of copies of the "Con- 
cessions " in the East, was the arrival in New Jersey of John 
Pike, Daniel Pierce and seven associates, from Newbury, Massa- 
chusetts. They entered into an agreement on the eleventh of 
December, 1666, whereby, on the third of December, 1667, 
they received from Governor Carteret and some of the Elizabeth- 
town associates a grant of land, embracing what is now the 
township of Woodbridge. They, as the representatives of at 
least sixty families, on the first of June, 1669, were granted a 
charter creating a township covering six miles square. The 
name of their new settlement was derived from their late pastor, 
John Woodbridge, of Newbury. In laying out this township it 
was agreed that Amboy-point should be reserved, to be disposed 
of by the lords-proprietors as the seventh part to which they 
Were entitled under the " Concessions," and which, in the origi- 
nal agreement with Pierce, Pike and others it was settled should 
stand for one thousand acres of upland and meadow. This avail- 
able and attractive spot was afterwards selected as the place of 
government. Among the persons allotted lands by the governor 
and his associates, and the most of whom, it is believed, settled 
on their estates, were the following : John Pike, Daniel and 
Joshua Pierce, Obadiah Ayres, Henry Jaques, Thomas Bloom- 
field, Elisha Parker, Richard Worth, .John Whitaker, Jonathan 
Dunham, Hugh Dun and Robert A^an Quellen. Most of the new- 
comers were from Newbury and Haverhill, Massachusetts, 
though a few families had planted themselves at this point in 
1665, having reached the province with Governor Carteret by 
the ship, Philip. John Pike was the ancestor of that General 
Zebulon Montgomery Pike who in the year 1806 wrote his 
name among the clouds on one of the loftiest peaks of the 



Early Settlers at Woodbridge and Newark. 109 

Rocky mountains. Thomas Bloomfield was the ancestor of one 
of New Jersey's later governors. Obadiah Ayres and Richard 
Worth were sons-in-law of John Pike, who may be called the 
patriarch of the settlement. Worth, either because of his name 
or his virtues, seems to have been much more highly esteemed 
by his father-in-law than was Ayres, as John Pike in his 
will left the latter six-pence, while the former received the 
munificient bequest of one shilling. Another legacy of this 
will is interesting, as showing the scarcity and value of litera- 
ture in those early times. He left to his son, Thomas, a '' half 
right in my book, writ by David Dickson." Robert Van Quel- 
len, also known as De La Prie and La Prairie, emigrated from 
Holland, but is said to have been a Norman, coming originally 
from Caen. He early became an important man in the colony. 
Governor Carteret secured his services as a member of the first 
council, and for many years he was surveyor-general of East 
New Jersey. In addition to his holdings in Woodbridge town- 
ship he became a large owner of lands on the upper Raritan, and 
his name is a frequent one in connection with old New Jersey 
titles. 

The third New England migration was as follows : In the 
winter of 1665 and 1666 some of the inhabitants of Guilford and 
Branford, in Connecticut, finding themselves in need of larger 
areas of farming lands, sent a deputation to report on the condi- 
tion and prospects of the country in the neighborhood of Eliza- 
bethtown. Their impressions being favorable, in the following 
May thirty families, under the leadership of Robert Treat, pur- 
chased of the Indians a tract embracing the present townships of 
Newark, Springfield, Livingston, Orange, Bloomfield and Cald- 
well. Their new town on the Passaic was first named Milford, 
but two years later, with other arrivals, came an aged con- 
gregational minister, Abraham Pierson. At a salayy of thirty 
pounds per annum, he was the faithful pastor of the colony 
until his death. In his honor the name was changed to 
Newark, after the town on the Yarrow, in England, where this 
minister had been ordained. These settlers from Connecticut 
were, for a time, disinclined to recognize the rights of the lords- 
proprietors, and preferred resting the claim to their holdings on 
the Indian title. They, by this disafi"ection, materially added 



110 The Story of an Old Farm. 

to the complications growing out of the conflicting inter- 
ests of Berkeley and Carteret and those claiming under the 
Nicolls' grant. 

The first general assembly of the province, composed of the 
governor, council and house of burgesses, convened in Eliza- 
beth, in 1668, and, with the exception of occasional meetings at 
Woodbridge, Middletown, and Piscataway, continued assembling 
there until 1682. In 1686, it met at Perth Amboy, and with 
but few exceptions alternated between that place and Burlington 
until the state capital was established at Trenton. 

Lord John Berkeley was an old man, and having been greatly 
disappointed in the financial results of his American investment, 
he decided to dispose of, and did, on the eighteenth of March, 
1673, sell his share in New Jersey to two English Quakers, John 
Fenwicke and Edwaz'd Billinge, for one thousand pounds. These 
purchasers quarrelled as to their respective interests, but, under 
the arbitration of William Penn, an amicable division was made, 
Fen wick receiving one-tenth as his share. Soon after this, Bill- 
inge becoming bankrupt, his interest was sold to Penn, Gawen 
Lawrie and Nicholas Lucas, as trustees for his creditors. They, 
in conjunction with Fenwicke, divided the whole proprietorship 
into one hundred equal parts, the trustees placing their ninety 
shares in the market. Before this time — on the twenty-ninth of 
July, 1674 — a new grant had been given by the king to the 
Duke of York, and by the duke to Sir George Carteret and to 
the grantees of Lord John Berkeley. The necessity was occa- 
sioned by the treaty of Westminster, in 1674, in which New Jer- 
sey was ceded to the King of England by the Dutch, New 
Netherlands having been captured and occupied by them during 
the previous year. In 1675, John Fenwicke, with a large com- 
pany, sailed from London in the ship " Griffin," and landing near 
the head of • Delaware bay, established on its eastern shore the 
town of Salem. This was the first English settlement in West 
Jersey. The second one was made two years later when a party 
of immigrants, principally Yorkshire and London Quakers, landed 
from the ship " Kent," and laid out a town which they first called 
New Beverly, then Bridlington, afterwards Burlington. 

In the second grant of New Jersey, made by the Duke of York, 
a dividing line was mentioned as running from Barnegat creek to 



The Division of the Province. Ill 

the Rancocus. From this it would appear that previous to the 
time of issuing the patent Berkeley and Carteret had agreed upon 
a division of the province. It was not, however, until the first of 
July, 1676, that a formal partition of New Jersey was made 
between Carteret and the Quaker proprietors, it being effected 
by a conveyance known as the Quintipartite deed, because of its 
comprehending Sir George, Penn, Lawrie, Lucas and Billinge. 
Thenceforth Carteret's share of the province was what has since 
been known as East Jersey. It embraced all the territory lying 
east of a line, which, starting at a point on the Atlantic coast, on 
the east side of Little Egg Harbor inlet, ran northwesterly to a 
point in the Delaware river a few miles below Minisink island, 
in Sussex county. This line crossed the Raritan river just west 
of Somerville, the point being still marked by a surveyor's stone 
standing by the roadside, on the south bank of the river, nearly 
opposite a residence built some years ago by John V. Veghte. 




CHAPTER IX. 

The Twenty-four Proprietors of East New Jersey — George WiU 
locks and the Peapack Patent. 

In the year 1679, Sir George Carteret died. By his will he 
devised his East Jersey property to trustees, empowering them 
to sell the same for the payment of his debts. For over two 
years East Jersey government was administered in the name of 
''The Right Honorable the Lady Elizabeth Carteret, Baroness, 
Widow, the relict and sole Executrix of the Right Honorable Sir 
George Carteret, Knight and Baronet, deceased, late Lord 
Proprietor of the said Province, and Grandmother and Guardian 
of Sir George Carteret, Baronet, Grandson and Heir of the said 
Sir George Carteret deceased, the present Lady Proprietrix of 
the Province aforesaid." In 1682 the trustees, together with the 
widow as executrix, in consideration of thirty-four hundred 
pounds, conveyed all of East Jersey to twelve purchasers, 
William Penn, Robert West, Thomas Rudyard, Samuel Groom, 
Thomas Hart, Richard Mew, Thomas Wilcox, Ambrose Rigg, 
John Haywood, Hugh Hartshome, Clement Plumsted and 
Thomas Cooper. They, in their turn, sold one-half of their 
undivided interests to twelve associates, Robert Barclay, Edward 
Billinge, Robert Turner, James Brain, Arent Sonmans, William 
Gibson, Gawen Lawrie, Thomas Barker, Thomas Warne, 
James, Earl of Perth; Robert Gordon and John Drummond. 
Thus was constituted the " Twenty-four Proprietors of 
East New Jersey," an association of land owners that has 
a corporate and active existence to this day. On the fourteenth 
of March, 1682, their title was further assured by a confirmatory 
deed from the Duke of York, giving to the proprietors all neces- 
sary powers for establishing a council and managing and govern- 



Origin of the Name Perth Amboy. 113 

ing their estate or province. We now find that one undivided 
twenty-fourth part of East New Jersey is by these conveyances 
as fully and completely vested in each proprietor as if the terri- 
tory was a farm or a city lot. Each one had full power to alien- 
ate the whole or a portion of his interest, or the privilege of 
locating for himself certain lands which the joint proprietors 
would secure to him in severalty by a warrant, which acted as a 
release of the interests of his associates. It also expressed what 
amount or proportion of his common stock was severed and 
represented by these located lands. 

The " Twenty-Four Proprietors " established their seat of gov- 
ernment at Perth Amboy, deriving the name from the Earl of 
Perth — one of their number — and from Amho, the English cor- 
ruption of an Indian word which is generally believed to have 
meant point. The latter appears variously spelled in early 
documents; as Omjwgc, Embolic, Anihoyle and Amho. The late 
Thomas Gordon, of Trenton, considered the derivative of Amboy 
to be the Indian word Emboli — meaning hollow, like a bowl ; so 
named because of a depression in the ground, a little north of the 
city. The Scotch word Perth is said to be a corruption of Barr- 
Tatha, or the " height on the river Tay." It is on this river 
that the ancient city of Perth is situated. 

The new proprietors modified somewhat the " Concessions and 
Agreements" of their predecessors, though retaining many of 
their most important provisions. The liberal feature of offering 
headlands to settlers, free of cost except quit-rents, was retained 
and continued in force for a number of years. Very complete 
descriptions were published in Europe of the advantages that 
would accrue to adventurers who removed to the province ; the 
manner of the disposition of the lands was explained, and a full 
account given of the physical condition of the country. In these 
published descriptions detailed statements were made as to the 
"goodness and richness of the soil;" that the country was "well 
stored with deer, conies, wild fowl" and other game ; that the 
"sea-banks were well stored with a variety of fish, such as 
whales, cod, cole, hake, etc." ; and that " the bays and rivers 
were plentifully stored with sturgeon, great bass and other scale 
fish, eels and shell fish, such as oysters, etc., in great abundance, 
and easy to take." Much stress was laid on the fact of there 
8 



114 The Stouy of ax Old Farm. 

being safe and convenient harbors, affording excellent opportun- 
ities for the export of the products of the province, among which 
were enumerated whale-fins, bone and oil, and beaver, mink, 
raccoon and martin skins. After dwelling on the salubrity of 
the climate, the good temper of the Indians, and the manner and 
costs of setting out from the old country, the descriptions, or 
advertisements, closed with the following excellent advice to the 
prospective emigrants : 

All persons inclining unto those parts must know tluit in tlieir settlement 
there the_v will find their exercises. They must have their winter as well as 
summer. They must lahor hefore they reap; and, till their plantations he 
cleared (in summer time), they must expect (as in all those countries) the 
mosquitos, flies, gnats and such like, may in hot and fair weather give them some 
disturbance where people provide not against them. 

The mosquitoes seem to have been early recognized as among 
the most active of the iniiabitants of the new country. This is 
not the only time they are mentioned by the first settlers. 
John Johnstone — whose better acquaintance we shall shortly 
make — in a letter written in 1684, though "mightily well sat- 
isfied with the country," could not forbear referring to a little 
flea that was occasionally blown toward the Raritan from Eliza- 
bethtown by an east wind. The distribution abroad of these 
plans and prospectuses induced a considerable emigration from 
Europe, especially from Scotland, which country was under- 
going at that time great political convulsions. East Jersey is 
to this day greatly benefited by the Scotch blood that was then 
transfused into her veins. The unhappy scenes that, just before 
and after the year 1700, were enacted in the Haymarket of the 
gray-castled city of Edinburgh, and the hunting of poor refugees 
through the mists of the bleak Highlands of that grim, sea-beaten 
land, resulted in the planting among the hills of Somerset of a 
sturdy stock which speedily developed into the three strong Pres- 
byterian congregations of Bound lirook. Basking Ridge and Lam- 
ington; and in many ways the immigrant Scots have contributed 
to the individual strength and virtue of the people of that county. 

When East Jersey came under the dominion of the twenty- 
four proprietors, in 1682, their historian, William A. White- 
head, estimates the total population of the province to have been, 
thirty-five hundred in the towns and about fifteen hundred on 
the plantations. The towns then existing were as follows : 



Colonel Lewis Morris Founds Shrewsbury. 115 

Shrewsbury, in Monmouth county. The township, embracing 
thirty thousand acres, had a population of about four hundred, 
among whom was Colonel Lewis Morris. He was a brother of 
that Richard Morris, who, flying from England to the province 
of New York at the time of the Restoration, received a grant in 
1661 of three thousand acres on the Harlem river, which he 
called Morrisania; at his death. Colonel Lewis Morris came 
from Barbadoes, and assumed the guardianship of Richard's 
infant son, who in later life became governor of New Jersey. 
Colonel Morris married for his first wife, Tryntje Staats. His 
second wife was Tryntje's own niece, Sarah, daughter of Isaac 
Gouveraeur, whose wife, Sarah, was the daughter of Major 
Abraham Staats of Albany, and an East Indian ''Begum" or 
princess, whom the Major had married in Java. These two mar- 
riages brought to Colonel Morris three distinguished sons. By the 
first, General Lewis Morris who signed the " Declaration ;" by the 
second, Gouverneur Morris, and General Staats Morris who mar- 
ried the Duchess of Gordon ; the acquaintance of this Scotch noble- 
woman we shall make later in Bedminster. Before the time of the 
twenty -four proprietors coming into possession of East New Jersey 
Colonel Lewis Morris had established at Shrewsbury extensive 
iron-works, which gave occupation to about seventy slaves, in 
addition to white servants and employees. His grant, under date 
of 1676, covered thirty-five hundred and forty acres ; he named it 
Tinturn — now called Tinton — after his home in Britain, which 
was in the vale of Tinturn, in the extreme south of Monmouth- 
shire, Wales. There it was that Theodoric, Christian king of 
Glamorgan, vanquished the pagan Saxons, though so wounded 
that he died shortly after the battle, in the near-by parish of 
Matherne. "This is the vale," writes Gray, " that is the 
delight of my eyes and the very seat of pleasure." Morris was 
also instrumental in giving Monmouth county its name, he call- 
ing it after the Welsh shire. The name Monmouth is generally 
accepted as meaning, and shortened from, Monnow-raouth, the 
English town of Monmouth being situated on a tongue of land at 
the mouth of the river Monnow. 

MiDDLETOWN, covering about the same area as Shrewsbur^^, 
contained about five hundred people and many improved planta- 
tions. 



116 Thk Story of an Old Farm. 

This township disputes with Bergen, in Hudson county, the 
claim of being the first permanent white settlement in New Jer- 
sey, and connected with the introduction of its Dutch occupation 
is a strangely romantic and interesting story. When Hendrick 
Hudson carried the news to Holland of the discoveries he had made 
in the new country, ships in numbers soon came sailing over the 
watery waste to visit this "goodly land." From then till now the 
ribs of many a stout craft have been battered to fragments on the 
bars and beaches of Sandy Hook. The first shipwreck known to 
have occurred at this point was as early as 1620, and connected 
with the stranding of the vessel there has come down to us an 
account of a most remarkable instance of the preservation of 
human life. On board was a young woman from Holland by the 
name of Penelope van Princis ; at least such was her maiden name, 
that of her husband, who accompanied her, being unknoA\Ti. 
Those of the ship's company who reached the shore in safety made 
their way -on foot to New Amsterdam (New York). Penelope's 
husband, being badly injured, was unable to undertake the jour- 
ney ; so she remained with him in the woods on Sandy Hook. 
Soon after the de])arture of their shipmates they were attacked 
by Indians, who left them for dead. The husband was, indeed, 
so, but the wife, though fearfully injured, revived. Her skull 
was fractured, and her left shoulder so cut and hacked that she 
never after had the use of that arm. Her abdomen had been 
laid open with a knife so that the bowels protruded and were 
only kept in place by her hands. Yet in this deplorable condi- 
tion she lived for several days in a hollow tree, sustaining life by 
eating bark, leaves and gum. 

At the end of a week Penelope was discovered by two 
Indians who were chasing a deer. One of them, an old 
man, moved by her condition and sex, conveyed her to 
his wigwam, near the present site of Middletown, where 
he di'essed her wounds and treated her with great kindness. 
Here she remained for some time, but, eventually, the Dutch of 
New Amsterdam, on learning that there was a white woman liv- 
ing with the natives in the woods beyond the great bay, came 
to her relief. Her preserver, who had cured her wounds and 
tenderly cared for her, interposed no objections to her rejoining 
her friends, by whom she was welcomed as one from the dead. 



The Settlement of Middletown. 117 

Some time after, when in her twenty-second year, this young 
Dutch widow married a wealthy English bachelor of forty, 
named Richard Stout, a son of John Stout, a gentleman of good 
family of Nottinghamshire, England. This remarkable woman 
was the ancestress of the very large and important family of 
Stouts in New Jersey, and her history, you may be sure, is often 
told by her posterity. She survived her marriage eighty-eight 
years, attaining the extraordinary age. of one hundred and ten, 
and leaving at her death five hundred and two living descend- 
ants. 

After Penelope became Mrs. Stout she did not forget the 
fertile soil and natural beauties of the Nmi-ves-sing, or Nave- 
sink country, and there is every reason to believe that she was 
the means of interesting her husband in that locality. The 
descendants of these Monmouth pioneers claim that immediately 
after marriage they settled where is now Middletown, and that 
in 1648 they and six other families were the only white inhabit- 
ants of that region. The historian, Smith, says: '^A while 
after marrying to one Stout, they lived together at Middletown 
among other Dutch inhabitants." In April, l(i65. Governor 
Nicolls, as the representative of the Duke of York, patented the 
whole of Monmouth and part of Middlesex counties to Richard 
Stout and eleven associates, the patentees agreeing to " manure 
and plant the aforesaid land, and premises, and settle there one 
hundred families at least." The late ex-Governor Joel Parker 
is my authority for saying that this Monmouth patent authorized 
and put in operation the first local government in New Jersey of 
which we have any authentic record. The holders under this 
grant, as was the case with those holding under the one made by 
Nicolls to the Elizabethtown associates, came into frequent litig- 
ious conflicts with the grantees of Berkeley and Carteret. 

PiscATAWAY had about four hundred inhabitants, the township 
embracing nearly forty thousand acres. 

WoODBRiDGE contained about thirty thousand acres in the 
township, and had a population of six hundred. 

Elizabethtown, the seat of Carteret's government, possessed 
seven hundred inhabitants, with fifty thousand acres in the 
township. 

Newakk also had fifty thousand acres in the township, and a 



118 The Story of an Old Farm. 

population of five hundred. In addition, it possessed jurisdiction 
over the plantations of Sandford, Kinj^sland, Berry and Pin- 
home, upon the Passaic and Hackensack rivers. The latter 
estate was at Secaucus, near Snake hill, and the name of the 
present Penhorn creek is derived from that of its owner. Will- 
iam Pinhorne was an Englishman who came to this country with 
Governor Edmund Andross in 1678. Establishing himself in 
New York city he became a successful merchant and occupied 
many positions of public trust. On removing to his estates in 
New Jersey, he was appointed to the king's council, and was 
chosen member of the assembly and judge of the supreme court. 
The Sandford, Berry and Kingsland plantations were at what is 
now known as Putherford, then called New Barbadoes' neck. 
This vicinity was first settled by Captain William Sandford, and 
Isaac Kingsland who came from the West Indies — hence the 
name. 

Bergen had three hundred inhabitants, and jurisdiction over 
several improved plantations on the bays, rivers and kills, 
besides over sixty thousand acres within its own township, 
which embraced all the present county of Hudson lying east 
of the Passaic river. Bergen was established in 1660. Among 
the earlier settlers were Cornelius Van Voorst, Englebert Steen- 
huysen, Tielman Van Vleck, Lourens Anndriessen (Van Bos- 
kerk), Christian Pieterse, Michael Jansen (Vreeland) and Gerrit 
Gerritsen (Van Wagenen). This is considered the most ancient 
permanent settlement in New Jersey, dwellings having been 
erected at Pavonia, within the confines of the township as after- 
wards established, as early as 1630. The latter name is derived 
from Michael Pauw, burgomaster of Amsterdam and Lord of Ach- 
tienhoven, who in that year obtained from the Indians a convey- 
ance of a large acreage, lying on the west shores of the Hudson. 
This is believed to be the first conveyance of lands in East Jer- 
sey. His title was further assured by the Dutch government, 
and its owner was created one of the original patroons of New 
Netherlands. Pauw gave his name to this territory, first latin- 
izing it into Pavonia, pauw in the Dutch, and^jaro in the Latin, 
meaning peacock. Why should not this proud bird, significant 
of the first legal occupation of New Jersey, be impressed on the 
great seal of the state I 



Subdivision of the Proprietors' Interests. 119 

Authorities differ as to the origin of the name of Bergen. New- 
Jersey's earliest historian, Smith, derives its title from the capi- 
tal of Norway, there having been Scandinavians as well as Dutch 
among its early settlers. Barber, Whitehead, and Gordon accept 
this derivation, but Taylor, in his " Annals" considers Bergen 
op Zoom, in Holland, to have been the godfather of East Jersey's 
oldest town. Winfield shows that the towns of Bergen in both Nor- 
way and Holland received their names from their respective near- 
by hills. The New Jersey village being located on an eminence 
overlooking the marshes on the east and west, and the lowlands 
bordering the Hudson, he believes received its name from the 
same local circumstances, the word Bergen meaning hill. This 
seems by far the most reasonable explanation of the origin of 
the name. 

The first governor under the proprietors was Robert Barclay, 
one of the associates, who was appointed for life with the right 
of ruling by deputy. To represent him he selected Thomas 
Rudyard, a London attorney of distinction. On arriving out, in 
November, ]682, this deputy wrote home that he was delighted 
to find that the province was occupied by "a sober, professing 
people, wdse in their generation, and courteous in their behaviour." 
Before the end of 1683 Rudyard was superceded by Gawen 
Lawrie, whose successor was Lord Neil Campbell, who in turn 
was followed by Andrew Hamilton. In the autumn of 1690 
Robert Barclay died, the power of governing reverting to the 
proprietors. Deputy-Governor Hamilton, who was then in 
England on a visit, thereupon, though after some delay, received 
the appointment of governor-in-chief. 

Many years had not gone by before the number of 
proprietors and the subdivision of their interests caused 
much disturbance and confusion in the manner of govern- 
ment, and the choice of governor was attended by great rivalry 
and discord. As each proprietor was at liberty to dispose 
of his propriety in as many parts as he pleased, these sales 
were frequently made in small fractions ; consequently the num- 
ber of proprietors was not only greatly augmented, but their dis- 
tribution in different countries caused much embarrassment. At 
this time New Jersey experienced its first political convulsion, 
finally resulting, in 1709, in an armed resistance to the authori- 



120 



The Story of an Old Farm. 



ties. It must be remembered that the people had no choice in 
the selection of the chief magistrate — that right devolved on the 
proprietors or owners of propriety interests. These individual 
holdings so multiplied as to almost render concerted action 
impossible. The following list of portions of shares acquired by 
George Willocks — of whom much more hereafter — will best 
exemplify the extent to which trading was done in these propriety 
rights ; 



1702, January 23- _- 
1692, February 15-- 
1695, December 2- 



1696, September 18- 

1727, July 17 

1725, October 10- -- 

1708, July 6 

1716, December 28- 
1727, June 28 



ORIGINAL 
rROPRIE'rOR. 



GRANTOR. 



Ambrose Rigg- 
Thos. Rudyard- 
Thos. Kudyard- 
Tlios. Rudyard- 



John Heywood 



John Heywood 
John Heywood 
John Heywood j 
Thomas Cooper 
Thos. Rudyard- 
Thomas Barker 



John Johnstone- - 
Benj. Rudyard — 
Robt. Wiiarton-- 
Margaret, widow of 
Sam'l Winder, mar- 
ries Geo. Willocks- - 
James Willocks dies, 
and devises to George 

Willocks 

Robt. Gordon 

.John Parker 

John Hamilton 

Thomas Gordon 

Andrew Job n stone - 
John .Johnstone 



QUANTITY. 



1-5 of 19-20 of 1-24. 
1-2 of 1-24. 
l-2of l-4of 1-24. 



1-2 of 1-2 of 1-24. 



3-4of l-8of 1-24. 

1-64 of 1-24. 

1-8 of 1-24. 

1-16 of 1-24. 

1-20 of 1-48 of 1-24. 

1-8 of 1-24. 

1-2 of 1-24. 



Willocks also purchased of William Violent the one-twentieth 
of Thomas Cooper's original twenty-fourth, the share being con- 
veyed to him and Andrew Hamilton with right of survivorship ; 
at Willock's death this interest vested in Hamilton as survivor. 
On the twentieth of February, 1698, George Willocks conveyed 
to Jeremiah Basse seven-eighths of one twenty-fourth. 

On the eighth of April, 1698, Governor Alexander Hamilton 
was succeeded by Jeremiah Basse. In the following year num- 
bers of the inhabitants refused to him obedience on the alleged 
discovery that his appointment had not received the prescribed 
form of royal approbation, nor the sanction of a sufficient number 
of proprietors. The disturbances were further increased by the 
colonists in the hope that continued agitations would provoke the 
Crown to deprive the proprietors of authority, in which case 
the land-owners thought to be able to rest their titles on the 
Indian grants, and thus be relieved from quit-rents. The New 
Jersey magistrates imprisoned some of these malcontents, 
whereupon other citizens rose in arms, broke open the jails, 



The Proprietors Abandon the Government. 121 

and confusion and anarchy ensued. This condition of affairs 
was increased by certain of the proprietors reappointing 
Hamilton as governor. Those of the people who sympathized 
with Basse, refused support to the new administration, resulting 
in still greater turbulence. Justices were assaulted, sheriffs were 
wounded, and such general confusion prevailed among the people 
that the prop**ietors, weary of contentions, were glad to abandon 
their government, in 1702, to Queen Anne, reserviT^g, however, 
to themselves every other right that had been granted them. 
The proprietors, though their importance was much abridged, 
remained a powerful association of land owners, and the fountain 
head of the title to all the undisposed acres of East Jersey. The 
owners of West New Jersey, as the assigns of Lord John Berke- 
ley, having had equal difficulties in the government of their por- 
tion of the colony, joined with East New Jersey in the surrender 
of the right of ruling. The two divisions again became one, and, 
on the fourth of August, 1702, Lord Cornbury became the first 
governor under the Crown. 

Among the proprietors, and one of the original twelve, was 
John Heywood, a Quaker. His title to the one twenty-fourth 
part of East New Jersey emanated not only from the estate of 
Sir George Carteret — he held as well, in conjunction with his 
associates, a confirmatory grant from the Duke of York, dated the 
fourteenth of March, 1682. A' copy of a deed in my possession 
shows that on the twenty-third day of the same month Heywood 
transferred all his rights and interests in and to the province, to 
" Robert Burnet, of Lothentie, in Scotland, Gent." By an " In- 
denture," as the conveyance recites : 

Made the first day of July, in tlie five and thirtieth year of the reign of our 
Sovereign Lord, Charles the Second, by the Grace of God, of England, Scotland, 
France and Ireland, King, defender of the faith, etc., Anno Dom., 1683. 

Burnet upon receiving title to his share of East Jersey, con- 
veyed to James Willocks, " Doctor in Phisick" of Kenny, in the 
Kingdom of Scotland : 

" In consideration of" — so runs the deed — " the sum of one hundred and sixteen 
pounds, thirteen shillings and four pence, of good and lawful money of England, 
one undivided eighth part of his undivided twenty-fourth part of the said tract of 
land, and of all and every, the isles, islands, rivers, mines, minerals, woods, fish- 
ings, hawkings, huntings, fowlings, and all other royalties, profits, commodities 
and hereditaments, whatsoever, reserving always to the said Robert Burnet and 



122 The Story of an Old Farm. 

his foresaids, the right of the g^overnment, simply and allonerly as it is now 
established in the persons of the Twenty -four Proprietors." 

It does not appear that Doctor James Willocks ever visited 
America. He applied for, and on the sixteenth of April, 1687, 
received from the joint proprietors a warrant, which confirmed to 
him in severalty four acres of land at Perth Amboy, and a tract 
of eight hundred and fifty acres, lying on the east side of the 
Millstone river at its conflux with the Raritan. Soon after this 
the doctor died, his brother, George, inheriting his real estate. 

In April, 1698, George Willocks sailed from England on 
the ship " Despatch, William Fiddler, Master." He reached 
Amboy with a cargo of goods belonging to the proprietors, 
of which he had charge, and he was also empowered to 
act as attorney for his associates in collecting quit-rents from 
settlers. He soon removed to Monmouth county, and married 
Margaret, widow of Samuel Winder, daughter of Deputy-Gover- 
nor Rudyard. From that time to 1754 he lived again in Amboy, 
on Staten Island, in Elizabethtown, and in Philadelphia. Not 
long after reaching East Jersey, Willocks was appointed " Chief 
Ranger," whatever that may have been, also a commissioner for 
the court of small causes. He was deputy-surveyor of the 
province under John Reid in 1701. During Burnet's adminis- 
tration he was a member of the, king's council. He does not 
seem, however, to have been in accord with the governor ; their 
repeated diflferences resulted, in 1722, in his suspension from 
office, being charged with acting as leader for a cabal of intriguers. 
'' His Majesty KIxNG George," under the great seal of the 
province of New Jersey, granted him, in 1719, *' the sole right, 
benefit, and advantage of keeping a ferry over the Raritan river 
from Perth Amboy." He also established a ferry across the sound 
from Amboy to Staten Island. He served the public in many 
ways, among others as that of one of the commissioners, appointed 
in 1720, for settling the boundary between the provinces of New 
York and New Jersey. 

The memory of George Willocks is most revered by the 
people of Perth Amboy from the fact of his having been one of 
the founders and a generous benefactor of St. Peter's Episcopal . 
church, one of the earliest organizations of that sect in New 
Jersey. A congregation for services according to the rites of 



St. Peter's Church at Perth Amboy. 123 

the Church of England was established in 1698. For a number 
of years it worshiped in an ordinary dwelling-house, standing on 
the banks of the Raritan near the foot of High street, the pulpit 
being supplied by various missionaries sent out from England by 
the Bishop of London, and the "Society for the Propagation of the 
Gospel in Foreign Parts." Lewis Morris writes, in L700 : " We 
have made a shift to patch up an old ruinous house and make a 
church of it, and when all the churchmen in the province are got 
together we make up about twelve communicants." In 1709 the 
Peverend Edward Vaughan's services were secured, who 
officiated for two years in conjunction with his home charge at 
Elizabeth towai. He was much esteemed by the people, which is 
more than can be said of his successor, Mr. Halliday, who 
entirely failed in gaining their affections, he being stigmatized by 
some members of his congregation — among them Governor Hun- 
ter — as a wretch, a knave and a villain. Finally, in 1733, after 
openly denouncing Willocks from the pulpit, the doors of the 
sanctuary were closed against this minister, and shaking the 
dust of Amboy from his feet he betook himself to other 
parts. 

Again Mr. Vaughan acted as an occasional supply, and in 1720 
St. Peter's obtained its first rector, a Scotch divine of blessed 
memory. This was the Reverend William Skinner. He was a Mac 
Gregor, by some, thought to be chief of the clan. Being obliged 
to fly from Scotland after the battle of Preston in 1715, he came 
by way of Holland and Barbadoes to Philadelphia, where while 
studying theology he supported himself as a tutor. In 1721 he 
visited England to receive ordination from the Bishop of London. 
While there he was appointed by the " Society for Propagating 
the Gospel in Foreign Parts " as missionary to Perth Amboy. 
On arrival he met with such favor from the people, that in the 
following year he was called to be the permanent pastor of the 
society, which position he filled faithfully and . acceptably until 
his death at the age of seventy-one, in the year 1758. 

In 1718 a charter was granted by the Crown to the congre- 
gation, and the erection of a church edifice was commenced in 
the following year. This building withstood the elements for one 
hundred and'thirty years, it giving place in 1852 to the present 
structure, which occupies the same site, a beautiful elevation 



124 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

overlookini^ the bay and ocean. St. Peters had many 
benefactoi's among- the early Scotch worshipers. Our first 
knowledg;e of Mr. Willocks in sucli a role is from the minutes of 
the Board of Proprietors, which record that, in 1702, he and 
Miles Foster advanced six pounds for repairing the dwelling, 
then occupied for services. When the first church edifice was 
erected, the grounds (still in use) were donated by him, Thomas 
Gordon and John Barclay. Later on, he and John Harrison 
presented the congregation with twelve acres of land lying 
adjoining the town. On the first of January, 1723, he conveyed 
to trustees two acres of land fronting on Water street, upon 
which was a substantial stone and frame residence. Under cer- 
tain restrictions and limitations they were to hold the property, 
as the deed recites : 

For the use of a Presbyter of the Church of England, qualified and admitted 
into said St. Peter's Church, to serve the Cure thereof — provided always notwith- 
standing sucli incumbent or incumbents being admitted and qualified, &c., that any 
time liereafter such incumbent or incumbents that shall differ from the doctrine, 
discipline and rules of the Churcii of England, shall from thenceforth have no 
benefit, or advantage by the benefactions aforesaid. 

More of the ecclesiastical gifts of George Willocks will appear 
when we come, presently, to learn something of the contents of 
his will. 

In grateful remembrance of the above, and other generous 

donations, the congregation, in 1825, affixed to the walls of the 

church auditorium a marble tablet, upon which is still to be read 

the following inscription : 

THIS TABLET. 

is designed to express the gratitude of the 

Congregation of St. Peter's Church in this city, 

to tlie benefactors of the said church, 

whose names follow : 

GEORGE WILLOCKS, 

who died in 1729. 

MARGARET WILLOCKS, 

his wife, 

who died in 1722. 

TPIOMAS GORDON, 

who died April 28, 1722, 

and 

JOHN HARRISON. 

They loved the habitation of God's house and' 

the place where his honor dwelleth. 

Erected A. D. 1825. 



• George Willock's Importance in the Colony. 125 

John Harrison was the first sheriff of Perth Amboy, and in 
the old record his name is often met with as the agent for the 
proprietors in locating lands and buying the Indian rights. 
Thomas Gordon came from Pitlochie, Scotland, in 1684, with 
his wife, Helen, four children and seven servants, and proved no 
small addition to the virtuous and refined society that his fellow 
countrymen were establishing in East Jersey. He selected a 
plantation some ten miles from salt water, on Cedar brook, near 
the present village of New Brooklyn, or South Plainfield. In 
February of the next year^ he wrote to the old country as 
follows : 

I am settled here in a very pleasant 'place upon the side of a brave plain, 
almost free of woods and near the water side, so that I might yoke a plough 
where I please, wei-e it not for want of hay to maintain the cattle, which I hope 
to get helped the next year, for I have several pieces of meadow near me — 
There are eight of us settled here, within half a mile -or a mile of another, and 
about ten miles from the town of New Perth or Amboy point, so that I can go 
and come in a day — Blessed be God, myself and wife and children and servants 
have been, and are still in good health, which God continue. 

His prayer was futile ; in less than two years he was the only 
one of his family alive. His wife and her six children lie in the 
old burying-ground of Perth Amboy, where a large stone with 
an antiquated inscription can yet be seen. 

Altogether we may readily persuade ourselves that George 
Willocks was a man of ability and an important personage in 
the community. Mr. Whitehead tells us that his time was 
principally employed in attending to his large landed estates, he 
having become deeply interested in real property. He pur- 
chased other portions of propriety shares, and gradually his undi- 
vided interest in the province was converted into holdings in sev- 
eralty, he obtaining warrants and releases from his brother pro- 
prietors for large tracts of land in Middlesex, Monmouth, Hunter- 
don, Somerset, Bergen and Passaic counties. 

Among the many large bodies of land acquired by George 
Willocks from the proprietors was one lying in Somerset county, 
known as the Peapack * patent. The warrant is made to him 

* Evidently an Indian name. A native thoroughfare which ran from east to 
west through northern New Jersey, crossing the Lamington river at its falls, was 
called the " Peapack Path," and was frequently mentioned as the boundary of 
early land grants. 



126 The Story of an Old Farm. 

and John Johnstone in severalty, as joint tenants, on " the sev- 
enth day of June, in the thirteenth year of the reign of William 
the Third, over England, Scotland, France and Ireland, King, 
etc., Annoque Dom. 1701," and is signed by the acting governor 
of the province, Andrew Hamilton, and five proprietors. Per- 
haps you may wonder at so few associates joining iu the convey- 
ance. By this time the proprieties had become divided into 
many small parts, and their o^vners were distributed into various 
portions of the world; consequently it was impossible that all of 
the proprietors, or even a majority of them, could join in a 
release to an associate. It was the custom, therefore, for a cer- 
tain number of them to meet with the governor and examine 
and pass upon applications for propriety lands. Those who met 
for this purpose were called the " Council of the Proprietors," 
and to secure a valid conveyance it was necessary that the 
patent, or warrant, should be issued under the great seal of the 
province, and be signed by the governor, and at least five of 
this council. Andrew Hamilton, who executed the grant to 
Johnstone and Willocks, was a brother-in-law of the latter, and 
originally a merchant in Edinburgh. He was one of that band 
of well-born Scotchmen who came to Amboy about the same 
time, establishing a little coterie of worth and aristocracy in East 
Jersey which long left its impress on the morals and manners of 
the people. He reached America in 1(385; coming as one of the 
proprietors he occupied a seat iu the council of Lord Neil Camp- 
bell and succeeded him as deputy-governor in 1686. He was 
governor from 1692 to 1698, and again from 1699 to 1701, and 
died at Amboy in 1703. 

John Johnstone, the joint owner with Willocks of the Peapack 
patent, was another of East Jersey's valued Scotch citizens. He 
had been a di-uggist in Edinburgh, "at the sign of the Unicorn ;" 
he was also a skilful physician and much esteemed by both rich 
and poor, especially by the latter, who were his particular care. 
Doctor Johnstone arrived in the province in December, 1685, by 
the " Henry and Francis, of Newcastle, a Ship of three hundred 
and fifty Tun, and Twenty great Guns, Kichard Hutton, master," 
in company with nearly two hundred of his banished and. 
oppressed countrymen. This ship had been chartered by George 
Scot, THE Laird of Pitlochie. This Scotch nobleman had 



The Fever Ship "Henry and Francis." 127 

been many times fined and imprisoned "for absence from the 
King's host," attending conventicles and other offenses obnoxi- 
ous to the government, and was finally released from prison upon 
his engaging to go to the plantations. He then published that 
" Model of the Government of East New Jersey in America," 
which is to be found bound with Whitehead's " East New Jer- 
sey under the Proprietors," and is the source of much of our 
information as to the earliest days of the province, and especially 
of its Scotch immigration. The promulgation, by Scot, of all the 
facts regarding this transatlantic retreat for the persecuted, 
induced many of his countrymen to join him in the undertaking 
of removing thitherward ; among them was his son-in-law, John 
Johnstone, who, on or before sailing, had married Scot's daughter 
Euphemia. The " Laird" was also authorized by the Crown ta 
take with him to America one hundred and five prisoners, then 
in the tolbooth at Leith, Many of these latter protested in. 
writing against being banished for conscience sake, in that they 
had refused allegiance to a king whom they felt bound to with- 
stand and disown, considering him an enemy to religion and an 
avowed papist. As all of these protestants were prisoners, some 
of whom are said to have suffered for their beliefs to the extent 
of the loss of a left ear, and many of whom were in danger of 
death, it seems strange that they should not have welcomed the 
opportunity for transportation to a country where safety, at least, 
awaited them, and probably prosperity. 

The " Henry and Francis" sailed from Leith on the fifth of 
September, 1685. Hardly had she reached Lands End when a 
malignant fever broke out among the passengers ; among its first 
victims were George Scot and his wife. The care of the people 
then devolved on John Johnstone. For many weeks the ship's 
company battled against disease and the fierce waves of the 
Atlantic, until finally, in December, when the vessel dropped 
anchor in the harbor of Perth Amboy, at least seventy of her pas- 
sengers had found graves at the bottom of the sea. Notwith- 
standing so inauspicious an advent into the colony. Doctor John- 
stone's character and attainments soon won for him the consider- 
ation of the citizens, whereby he was forced to accept many 
honorable and important positions in the community. He repre- 
sented the people for thirteen years in the general assembly,. 



128 The Story of an Old Farm. 

and for ten years was speaker of that body. He also 
served as judge of the supreme court of Monmouth county, 
was one of the king's council under the Burnet administra- 
tion, and held many other important offices. He seems for a 
time to have been a resident of New York, as he was mayor of 
that city from 1714 to 1718. Doctor Johnstone's Amboy resid- 
ence, a substantial brick mansion, was preserved until after the 
Revolution ; he also spent much time in Monmouth county on a 
plantation called ''Scotschesterburg," granted him and his wife 
by the proprietors as a reimbursement for his and his father-in- 
laAv's outlay in importing the Scotch refugees. He became an 
extensive land owner in several counties, being entitled to grants 
of headlands, and to grants because of propriety interests, he 
having purchased one-eighth of Thomas Rudyard's original 
share, one-sixteenth of John Hey wood's and two-fifth parts of 
nineteenth-twentieths of Robert Barclay's. 




CHAPTER X. 

Early New Jersey History Continued — The Story of the Title 
Completed — Somerset Land Grants. 

I wonder do my readers grow weary of these legal chapters ? 
If so, they must turn over the leaves until they reach some they 
may consider more interesting. It is a mistake to think that an 
author desires all his pages read. Naturally you may ask, why 
then were they written f Miss Woolson, in one of her clever 
sketches, suggests, '^perhaps for the writer's own amusement. '^ 
I think she is right, for though these legal chapters may be dull 
reading, their writing has proved a most agreeable task. There 
is a peculiar charm in poring over the dry records of a title, and, 
while tracing the history of a familiar piece of land, in forcing it 
to divulge the various changes of owners and conditions it has 
sustained since those early days when it formed an undesignated 
part of the vast, undefined area of primitive wilderness. So it is, 
that while I have been occupied in ascertaining all that could be 
learned regarding the " Old Farm," from the days when it was 
a portion of the domain of the "Merry King Charles" down to 
the time it vested in that sturdy yeoman Johannes Moelich, my 
time has not seemed uselessly employed. It is also pleasant to 
catch occasional glimpses through the dim perspective of the 
past of those persons who have directly or indirectly been con- 
nected with these ancestral acres. Biography is said to be the 
home aspect of history; so, as research brings to light the names 
of persons who have been even remotely associated with these 
homestead lands, I cannot refrain from endeavoring to learn of 
them all that can be discovered. My readers must be patient if, 
at times, in giving the results of such research, unimportant per- 
sonages are apparently allowed undue space and prominence. 
9 



130 The Story of an Old FAR>r. 

In reaching the Peapack patent it will soon be seen that we 

have rescued the " Old Farm " from the indefinite area of the 

wild lands of New Jersey, and located it within the definite 

bounds of a personal possession. The limits of this grant cannot 

to-day be readily defined by its description, which is as follows : 

Begins on Rackawack river, at the upper corner of a thousand acres of land, 
belonging to the said George Willocks, thence up the said Rackawack, including 
the same to the falls thereof, between two steep hills. Thence to the head of the 
easterinost crooks that unites with said Rackawack, in said Willock's land, and 
makes the North Branch of Raritan river. From thence east and by north to 
the top of that ridge of mountains that points southerly toward the Raritan 
river, thence running along the top of the said mountain southerly, as for as the 
northeast corner of a tract of land formerly Ann West's, now Michael Haw*don's, 
thence due west to said Hawdon's land, thus following the lines of said ITawdon's 
and of said Willock's land, to" where it begain. 

T have searched in vain at Trenton, at Amboy, and among the 
archives of the New Jersey Historical Society, at Newark, for a 
survey of the land included in this grant. If any exists it must 
be in private hands. The conveyance calls for thirty-one hun- 
dred and fifty acres, but its description embraces a territory 
aggregating nearly eleven thousand acres. At first thought this 
description is hardly intelligible, but a little study of early titles 
and some knowledge of subsequent transfers made of portions of 
the grant enables us to define with considerable accuracy the 
boundaries of the premises intended to be conveyed. 

The description commences at a point in one thousand acres of 
land vested in George Willocks by right of his wife, Margaret 
Winder, who had died in 1722, which land lay at the conflux of 
the north branch of the Raritan and Lamington rivers, formerly 
known respectively as the Peapack and Allametunk. This 
tract is designated as number 51, on the map accompanying 
schedule number HI., in the "Elizabethtown Bill in Chancery." 
It was conveyed by Greorge Willocks to Daniel Axtell on the 
twenty-fourth of June, 1726, and soon after that time that por- 
tion of the land lying east of the north branch of the Raritan 
came into the possession of George Teeple, the founder of the 
Teeple family at Pluckamin. The first real estate transfer within 
the limits of the present Bedminster township, was the purchase 
of this tract by Mrs. Willocks — when the widow of Samuel Win- 
der — on the twentieth of May, 1690. The description in the 
patent continues, " thence up the said Rackawack." This is 



The Duchess of Gokdon. 131 

evidently an error, and one probably made in copying the 
grant on the book of records, although, possibly, the mistake 
may have occurred in the original, as the scriveners of that 
time had but slight knowledge of the names of the water-courses 
of the New Jersey wildernesses. Rackawack, in early deeds, 
stood for Rockaway. The line of the Peapack patent did not 
touch that stream, but ascended the Lamington to its falls, near 
the Morris county line ; thence it continued easterly to the 
head waters of the north branch of the Raritan ; thence, 
southerly, following that stream to a point where it veers west- 
erly, below the mouth of Mine brook ; thence to the top of the 
first mountain south of Pluckamin ; thence following the 
crest of that mountain southeasterly, to the northeast corner of a 
thousand acre tract of land conveyed to Ann West on the four- 
teenth of August, 1693, and which is designated as number 58 
on the map before referred to in the " Elizabethtown Bill in 
Chancery," thence, westerly, along the north line of this land, to 
the east line of George Willock's thousand acres ; thence along 
his east and north line to the place of beginning. 

Ann West was the daughter of Deputy-Governor Thomas Rud- 
yard, and a sister of Mrs. Willocks. Her husband John West, a 
merchant, dying early, she married Robert Wharton, and later 
became the wife of Governor Andrew Hamilton. The upper por- 
tion of her land adjoined on the east the lower portion of her 
sister's tract, and, lying on both sides of Chamber's brook, is in both 
Bedminster and Bridgewater townships. The title to this lot passed 
to Catherine, Duchess of Gordon, of Gordon Castle, Scotland, 
who was the daughter of William, the second Earl of Aber- 
deen, and the locality is still known as " The Duchess." The 
tract is at present bisected by the road leading from the village 
of North Branch to Pluckamin, and is now subdivided, or was 
within a few years, into the farm homesteads of J. T. Van 
der Veer, Jerome Van Nest, Philip Van der Veer, Jacob 
Powelson and others, they deriving their title from the 
descendants of Abram Quick and John Van der Veer, who 
purchased the land in 1801 from Gouverneur Morris, as 
agent of the Duchess of Gordon. This Scotch noble-woman 
made the acquaintance of American investments througli 
having married Staats L. Morris, a brother of Gouverneur 



132 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

Morris, who early in life entered the English army, and ulti- 
mately attained the rank of general. The Duchess visited New- 
York with her husband, and is said to have been long remem- 
bered by metropolitan society for her good heart, blunt manners, 
frank conversation and masculine habits. 

In studying the old records of Somerset one cannot fail 
to notice with interest how many prominent and leading 
men of the last century have been directly or indirectly 
connected with the freeholds of the county. Gouverneiu' Morris 
may surely be classed among this number, for, in reading 
the story of his life, discovery is soon made that he was a 
much greater man than the majority of his contempor- 
aries. Had he been possessed of personal ambition his memory 
woidd occupy a more exalted place in history, as his present 
fame is far less than his abilities woidd have insured had he con- 
sented to place himself in the front of the many prominent move- 
ments with which he was connected. His eloquence in conver- 
sation was phenomenal ; it is claimed that not only would 
intelligent listeners hang on his words in rapt admiration, but that 
servants, arrested by his table-talk, stood open-mouthed, dishes 
in hand, to catch his glowing sentences. Put Morris where you 
woidd, he was always at home and always made an impression. 
So great was his equipoise, it was impossible to disturb the tran- 
quility of his mind and presence. When in France, as United 
States Minister, his marked individuality, eccentric and original 
manners, together with his undoubted intellect, made a strong 
impression on society in the French capital. Madame de Stael 
credited him with having " Vair tres imposanty^ and the king 
found in his features an extraordinary resemblance to those of 
the royal family. On one occasion, while attending an audience, 
the American statesman was approached by the monarch, who, 
after looking at him fixedly for a moment, exclaimed " The like- 
ness is, indeed, too wonderful to be accidental ! Pray, Mr. Mor- 
ris, was your mother ever in France ?" Morris with a respect- 
ful bow, quickly replied, " No, your Majesty, but my father 
was !" 

It is evident this Peapack patent embraced within its bound- 
aries nearly the entire township of Bedminster, and extended 
from below Pluckamin to somewhere near the Morris county 



Daniel Axtell, the Regicide. 133 

line, and from the north branch of the Raritan on the east to the 
Lamington river on the west. It included surveys numbered 59, 
62, 88, 120, 122, and those marked Daniel Axtell, and Doctor 
Johnstone Lewis and Mary Johnstone, as laid down on the map 
accompanying schedule III, "■ Elizabethtown Bill in Chancery." 
In May, 1660, when King Charles II. landed at Dover and 
made his royal progress to London, he fomid the people mad with 
loyal excitement. Drunk with the joy of his restoration. Crom- 
well, who had made England the leading power of Europe, was 
apparently forgotten. There no longer seemed to be any Romid- 
heads, Pm'itans, Covenanters, or Papists ; only a bell-ringing, 
bonfire-blazing nation, hysterical with delight at the return of a 
kmg. No one was more surprised at this rapture of the people 
than was Charles himself, who remarked to one of his suite that 
for the life of him he coiJd not see why he had staid away so 
long when every one seemed so glad to have him back again. 
In his pleasure at the enthusiasm his presence everywhere engen- 
dered, he was quite ready with all manner of promises as to for- 
giveness for past offences. Hardly, however, had he grown warm 
to his seat in the saddle of government, before he became con- 
vinced that justice to his father's memory demanded vengeance 
on those, at least, Avho had been immediately instrmnental in the 
sufferings of the late king. Among the unhappy persons who were 
consequently dragged on hurdles to their deaths was Daniel Axtell. 
He had been prominent in the Cromwellian army, and commanded 
the guard preserving order in Westminster Hall, at the court in 
which Charles I, was convicted of treason and sentenced to be 
beheaded. After the execution of Axtell, his son, also named 
Daniel, fled to Jamaica, in the West Indies, where engaging in 
trade he acquired a fortune. On visiting the American colonies 
in search of investments, he purchased a large slice of the Pea- 
pack patent, paying therefor: ^'The sum of one thousand two 
hundred and fourteen pounds, money of New York." The deed 
to him from Johnstone and Willoeks, under date of the twentieth 
of June, 1726, conveyed as follows: 

All that tract of land situate, lying and being within the bounds of a cer- 
tain tract of land granted by patent unto the said John Johnstone and 
George Willoeks, bearing date the seventh day of June, Anno Domini one 
thousand seven hundred and one, for their rights to several parcels of land, 
shares and parts of proprieties, in the eastern division of N'^'v Jersey, as 



134 The Story of an Old Farm. 

aforesaid: Beginning upon the north side of Peapack River, where the 
east line of a tract of land (granted by the said George Willocks unto Daniel 
Axtell aforesaid) toucheth the said river ; and from thence up the said river, as 
it runs, until it comes about ten chains above the forks thereof; from thence 
south, seventy-three degrees, west three hundred and seventy-two chains, unto 
AUaiuetunck river, be it more or less ; from thence down the stream thereof, as 
it runs, to where the west line of the land sold by George Willocks aforesaid 
unto the said Daniel Axtell toucheth the said River, thence along the said line 
north ninety-four chains, thence east eighty chains, thence south to Peapack 
River to where it is said to begin. * * * Containing four thousand and 
sixty-five acres, excepting one thousand two hundred and fourteen acres, belong- 
ing to John Hamilton, also four hundred and eighteen acres claimed by Charles 
Dunster by virtue of a survey made to Lord Neil Campbell and Robert Black- 
wootl, and entered in the second book of surveys, folio 132. 

As at that time a New York pound had a present United 
States coin vahie of three dollars and fourteen and one-quarter 
cents, we find that in the year 1726 the best of Bedminster lands 
were considered worth about one dollar and fifty-six cents per 
acre. With the exception of the exemptions, and of the Wmder 
tract which Willocks also sold to Axtell, the above conveyance 
covered all the coimtry boimded by the Lamington river, the north 
branch of the Raritan river, and the road leading from Bemards- 
ville to Lamington village. John Hamilton was the son of 
Governor Andrew Hamilton; his reservation I am unable to locate. 
The four hmidred and eighteen acres "claimed by Charles Dun- 
ster" was situated near where the two streams merge, and is 
designated as survey number 59, in schedule HI., " Elizabethto^^Ti 
Blil in Chancery." The recital of the area of premises conveyed 
by the Peapack patent, and by this deed from Johnstone and Wil- 
locks to Daniel Axtell, enables us to correct tlie following erron- 
eous statement to be found on page 29 of Messler's " Centennial 
History of Somerset County " : 

Between Lamington River and North Branch, Major Axtell owned a large and 
valuable tract of land, out of which Campbell and Blackwood purchased 3900 
acres, in 1693 ; Margaret Winder 1000, on May 20, 1690; Johnson and Willocks 
3150, June 6, 1701. This last survey included all the lands in Peapack valley; 
and finally Andrew Hamilton oljtained a deed for 875 acres on Lamitunk, Feb. 
25, 1740. This brings us to the Morris county line. 

Like errors as to the early history of Bedminster land titles 
will be found on pages 700, 704 and 705 of Snell's recent "His- 
tory of Hmiterdon and Somerset Counties." 

Just here permit me to say that the people of Somerset are 



William Axtell in New Jersey. 135 

greatly indebted to Doctor Messier for publishing the results of 
his painstaking researches as to the early history of the county. 
His labors have been valuable, not only in bringing to light 
facts of which, otherwise, we should have remained in ignorance, 
but because of exciting in the community an interest in local 
history, and by inciting in others the desire to still further pierce 
the dim mists that enshroud the days of long ago. Much the 
same may be said of the work of Mr. Snell in his compilation 
of facts, traditions and biography. But while man remains finite, 
so long will the best of histories be replete with errors. It 
is not belittling the efforts of these local historians to point 
out where their statements are erroneous. On the contrary, 
it is giving an added value to those historical nuggets they 
have unearthed, that contain only the piu'e metal of truth. As 
to the value of the materials they have collected there can be no 
dispute, and, with Macaulay, we may acknowledge an indebted- 
ness to an historian's accurate researches for the means of refut- 
ing in his work what we cannot fail to discover as errors. 

After the death of Daniel Axtell, (second), his son, William, 
who was born in Jamaica, came in 1746 to New Jersey in 
order to dispose of this estate. The result of his efforts within a 
few years was the planting, in this portion of the township, of the 
Van Doren, Van der Veer, McDowell, Teeple, Streit, Sloan and 
other families. Ultimately, while visiting New York, he ran 
away with and married the beautiful daughter of Abraham De 
Peyster, the treasurer of that province. Axtell built a substan- 
tial two storey, semi-detached brick dwelling in New York city, 
where he lived in a lavish manner as long as his money lasted. 
It stood on the present site of the Astor House, then in the out- 
skirts of the city ; the other half of the structure was the resi- 
dence of Walter Rutherford, whose wife was the sister of Lord 
Stirling. In Mrs. Lamb's " History of the City of New York," 
there is a picture of this dwelling showing it to have had 
a steep dormered roof, two small square windows on the 
main floor protected by heavy wooden shutters, and a front door 
which, opening abruptly on the side walk without step or break, 
was approached through a wooden porch. In 1754 Axtell 
removed to England, stopping on his way at Jamaica where he 
settled his father's estate. Some years later, returning to 



136 The Story of an Old Fa km. 

America he built a large mansion at Flatbush, Long Island, where 
he permanently settled. At the breaking out of the Revolu- 
tion he attached himself to the patriot cause, and was active in 
arousing the people of his county to the support of the American 
arms. After the disasters on Long Island and in Westchester 
his convictions underwent a change, and, swearing allegiance to 
the Crown, he became a violent partisan of the British. He was 
commissioned a colonel of a regiment of foot in his Majesty's 
service, and was also given many offices of a sinecm'e nature, 
which brought him a fortune. By marrying his adopted daugh- 
ter to a Major Miles of the Continental army he had hoped to 
secure his estates, but, by an act of attainder passed by the 
New York legislature on the twenty-second of October, 1779, 
all of his property, real and personal, was confiscated, and he, 
and others who were members with him of the king's comicil, 
were proscribed. The act declared that "each and every of 
them, who shall, at any time hereafter, be fomid in any part of 
this state, shall be and are hereby adjudged and declared guilty 
of felony, and shall suffer death as in cases of felony without 
benefit of clergy." On the evacuation of New York he removed 
to England, where he received a pension and a colonel's half-pay 
for life. 

There are descendants of a collateral branch of the Axtell 
family now resident in New Jersey. Thomas, a brother of 
Daniel Axtell the regicide, came to this country in about the 
year 1 642 and settled at Sudbury, Massachusetts, where he died 
four years later. His great-grandson, Henry, removed in 1 740 to 
New Jersey, establishing himself at Mendham in Morris county. 
This Henry was the great-grandfather of the Honorable Charles 
F. Axtell, of Morristown, and of the Honorable Samuel B. 
Axtell, late chief justice of New Mexico. 

George Willocks died in 1729. His executors, the Reverends 
Edward Vaughan and William Skinner, offered his will for pro- 
bate before Michael Kearney, surrogate, on the thirteenth of 
February of that year. I have in my possession a copy of that 
voluminous document. It goes to show the testator to have 
been a man of piety and good works, as it contains numerous 
generous bequests for religious and charitable purposes, and the 
following solemn nivocation and profession of faith : 



GrEORGE WiLLOCKS' WiLL. 137 

In the name of God, Amen. I, George Willocks, of Pei-th Amboy in the Prov- 
ince of New Jersey, being under a languishing distemper, but by God's goodness, 
master of my reason and memory, do think fit to make this my last will and 
testament. I acknowledge myself a great sinner, and have nothing to rely upon 
for the forgiveness of my transgressions, but the merits and mediation of my 
blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, for whose sake, merciful God forgive me, 
and receive me into the arms of thy mercy, and grant at the last day I may be 
raised among the elect, to praise Thee forever and ever. 

This last testament provided for the payment of debts, and the 
building of a tomb to cost seventy pomids ; this vault, though in 
ruins, is still to be seen in St. Peter's churchyard at Perth 
Amboy. It bequeathed to two negro slaves some cows and 
household furniture. The executors were directed to build a 
house and lay out a garden spot adjoining, for the slaves ; and a 
negro lad was to be bound to a cooper, who was to be paid for 
instructing him in his craft. The franchise and buildings of the 
^' Long Ferry" to South Amboy were devised to trustees, who 
were empowered to let or rmi the same, and apply the income, 
as the will recites : — 

To support the incumbent serving the Cure of St. Peter's Church in Perth 
Amboy, and his successors provided always that such Incumbents have received 
ordination of Deacon and Priest from the hands of a Bishop of the Church of 
England, and do continue members of the said Church according to the doctrines 
and discipline of the said Church. 

Divers tracts of lands in divers counties were ordered to be 
sold, and the proceeds divided in specified sums between rela- 
tives, friends, churches and the poor, in America and Scotland. 
The bulk of his landed estate, which was very great, was devised 
to George Leslie and Ann Richie, his nephew and niece, the lat- 
ter receiving his house and lot on Smith street in Amboy. The 
will disposes of the Peapack patent as follows : 

And whereas there is a tract of land remaining in partnership, besides what 
has been sold to Daniel Axtell, and two thousand acres given by me to Eupheraia 
Johnstone deceased and Margaret Smith, two daughters of John Johnstone, the 
remaining part of the said tract is still vested in tlie said John Johnstone and in 
me the said George Willocks, (only 418 acres released by the said John John- 
stone to me the said George Willocks). I, therefore, pray my executors to get 
the lands surveyed and a partition made between the said John Johnstone and 
me, after such partition be made, I give and grant to my executors full power 
and authority to sell and dispose of the same, and the money arising from such 
sale, after the payment of debts and legacies, the remaining part, I desire, may 
be put out upon good security and applied for the support of the children of the 
said George Leslie and Ann Richie, lawfully begotten. 



138 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Ann Richie and George Leslie were children of George Wil- 
locks' sister, the former being the wife of John Richie, a mer- 
chant of Aberdeen, Scotland. Leslie had joined his uncle in 
America several years before the latter's death, and after that 
event resided at Perth and South Amboy — at that time within one 
corporation — mitil his own death in 1751. His homestead property 
embraced some twelve hundred acres of land adjoining the ferry at 
South Amboy. He also was an active member of St. Peter's 
church, being a vestryman from the year 1722 to 1729, and 
again in 1750. He occupied pew No. 11 for which he paid six 
pounds and seventeen shillings per annum. 

Neither in the Department of State at Trenton, nor on the 
recoi'ds of the Board of Proprietors of East New Jersey at 
Amboy, nor among the Willocks papers in the custody of the 
State Historical Society, have I been able to find a copy of the 
survey directed by the will to be made ; nor any trace of the 
proceedings in partition. That a division, survey and map were 
made, is proven by frequent references in subsequent deeds to 
numbered lots in the Peapack patent. I have also searched in 
vain for the record of any conveyances of Somerset lands by the 
executors of George Willocks. At a meeting of the Board of 
Proprietors of East New Jersey, held the thirty-first of March, 
1743, the surveyor-general was directed to survey two thousand 
acres of land out of the patent for George Leslie. The order 
reads as follows: 

By virtue of an order of the Council of Proprietors this day made you are 
hereby authorized and required to lay out and survey for Mr. George Leslie or 
liis asbiifns within that tract called Peapack Two thousand acres of land and for 
so doing this shall be your sufficient warrant. 

Given under my hand and seal at Perth Amboy the thirtv-first day of March, 
1743. 

On such survey being made, the proprietors, on the twenty- 
third of June, 1744, conveyed to George Leslie two tracts of 
land. The description of the one in which we are especially 
interested reads as follows : 

Beginning at the northeast corner of the land of Daniel Axtell deceased, 
where it touches Peapack river; thence along said Axtell's line south, seventy- 
three Degrees, west one hundred and eighteen chains, to a corner of land late of 
Doctor John Johnstone decea.sed ; then along said Johnstone's line, north and by 
east thirty-five chains to his northeast corner ; then along another line of said 



George Leslie's Bedminster Grant. 139 

Johnstone's land, south seventy-six degrees, west one hundred and twenty-three 
chains to a stake to the northward of a white oak tree marked-on four sides, dis- 
tant therefrom forty links, which stake is upon the rising of a hill near to Julius 
Johnstone's, and is another corner of said Johnstone's land ; thence north and hy 
east to the southwest corner of another tract of land belonging to the said John 
Johnstone deceased, called by the name of lot No. 4, forty chains; thence north 
seventy -six degrees, east to the southeast corner of said lot No. 4 ; thence north 
and by east forty chains ; thence north seventy-six degrees, east twenty-eight 
chains to a brook commonly called Lawrence's Brook. Tlience down the stream 
of said brook to where it empties itself into said Peapack river; thence along 
said Peapack river to the beginning. Containing twelve hundred and ninety-one 
acres strict measure. 

The other tract conveyed by this warrant contained " four 
hundred and ninety-eight acres and thirty-two hundredths," 
lying on the east side of the Lamington river, just below its falls, 
and adjoining lot No. 13, belonging to John Johnstone's estate. 

It woidd thus appear that if the executors sold the portion of 
the Peapack patent set off to Willocks, the proprietors became 
the purch5.sers. If not, in some other manner they must have 
acquired legal title. It is well known that the great difference 
in acreage, between what the original patent called for and what 
it eventually surveyed, gave rise to complications and disputes 
between the proprietors and the beneficiaries under the Willocks 
"will, which greatly retarded the settlement of the estate. It is 
not impossible, therefore, that these complexities residted in a 
compromise whereby a portion of the patent again became vested 
in the proprietors. This last view of the case is made the more 
probable on the discovery of the following clause in the will of 
John Johnstone, which was proven on the seventeenth of Novem- 
ber, 1732: 

And whereas in the tract of land at Peapack formerly. Patented to George 
Willocks and to me the quantity of my share thereof does exceed the quantity 
of Proprietary Rights that I may have been entitled to. Now I doe hereby 
appoint and Empower my Executors or the Major part of them or the Survivors 
or Majority of the Survivors of them to compromise and agree that matter 
with the Proprietors and for such quantity of acres, as it will be found that I 
have at Peapack beyond my proprietary Right. I Impower my Executors to 
release and convey in fee or otherwise assume to the projjrietors an Equivalent 
out of That Tract of Land Esteemed in the County of Bergen, containing about 
five thousand eight hundred acres which I am entitled to by a return of survey 
in the Western Division of New Jersey. 

We may conclude, therefore, that Doctor Johnstone's instruc- 
tions being carried out, all differences as affecting his estate were 
healed by tlie conveyance of other lands to the proprietors. His 



140 The Story of an Old Farm. 

executors and heirs apparently came into peaceful possession of 
all that portion of the Peapack patent lying between the two 
rivers, the Morris county line, and the north line of the grant to 
Leslie which crossed the township at the nioutli of Peapack 
brook (Schomp's Mills). His estate also owned numerous sui'- 
veyed lots of extensive area lying east of Lainington and west 
of the Leslie tract — also the southeast corner of the patent, at 
and below where Pluckaniin was later established ; the first sale 
made by Doctor Lewis and Mary Johnstone being five hundred 
acres to Jacob Eoff, which included the site of that village. 

By referring to the description in the grant to Leslie, it will 
be seen that it commenced at Axtell's northeast corner, 'iliis point 
was where " Demund's bridge " now spans the north branch of the 
Raritan, and is the same corner at Avhich the description contained 
in the-deed from Leslie to Johannes Moelich began. The line of 
the grant extended westerly for nearly one and one-half miles 
along Axtell's boundary, which lay in the centre of the road 
rvmning from Bernardsville to Lamington ; here it reached the 
southeast corner of a plot that had been allotted to John Johns- 
tone, that fronted on this road for two miles, and extended back, 
northerly, three thousand and eighty feet. Leslie's line continued 
along the east and north boimdaries of this Johnstone plot west- 
erly to its west corner, a distance of over two miles. From there 
it extended in a northeasterly direction, following the lines of 
several plots that had been set off to Johnstone, to Lawrence's — 
then so called — now Peapack brook. From there it continued 
along the brook to its mouth, and so on down the north branch of 
the Raritan to the place of beginning. The greatest breadth of this 
tract, from cast to west, was about three and one-half miles, and its 
greatest depth, from north to south, one mile. With the excep- 
tion of the natural meadows bordering the river, it was entirely 
covered with timber. Leslie's right to this land does not seem 
to have rested on the ftict of his having been the heir of George 
Willocks. It was probably granted to him by the proprietors in 
consideration of proprietary interests, he having become the 
owner of one-sixteenth part, and seven sixty-fourths part of John 
Heywood's original twenty-fourth ; one-half of Thomas Barker's, 
one-eighth of Thomas Rudyard's, one-fortieth of Thomas Cooper's 
and one-fifth of nineteen-twentieths of Robert Barclav's. 



Some Perth Amboy Residents in 1751. 141 

George Leslie made no disposition of any portion of this prop- 
erty until the year 1751. And so, after a long story with many 
digressions, we now find ourselves where we started in this legal 
talk — at the conveyance, on the first of November, 1751, of the 
three hundi'ed and sixty-seven acres to Johannes Moelich. In 
returning to this deed it is interesting to notice that in phrase- 
ology and general form it does not materially differ from such 
instruments now in use. It was signed by George Leslie and his 
wife Elizabeth, witnessed by Griffen Disbrow and Jonathan 
Nisbitt, and recorded by Thomas Bartow, secretary of the prov- 
ince. Instead of the grantors having made acknowledgments 
as to their signatures, Samuel Nevill, one of the justices of the 
supreme court, certifies that the witnesses to the conveyance 
having been duly sworn made oath that they " saw the grantors 
seal, and, as their act and deed, deliver the same, etc." Of these 
attesting witnesses I know but little. Griffen Disbrow probably 
lived at or near Perth Amboy, as he was one of St. Peter's con- 
gregation, the minutes of that church showing that, in 1751, 
when pew No. 18 was forfeited for non-payment of dues, it was 
secured by him at an annual rental of £5.2.0. Thomas Bartow, 
the secretary of state, was the son of the Reverend John Bartow, 
the first rector of St. Peter's church, Westchester, New York, 
and the gTandson of the Huguenot General Bertaut, who fled 
from France in 1685. Bartow was frequently in the service of 
the province, and was clerk in chancery when the famous Eliza- 
bethtowri bill, at the suit of "John, Earl of Stair, and others. Pro- 
prietors of the Eastern Division of New Jersey against Benjamin 
Bond, and others," was filed on th-e thirteenth of April, 1745. By 
and by, when we shall have occasion to visit Perth Amboy with 
Johannes, we will look up this worthy secretary and learn some- 
thing of his home and surroundings. 

Judge Samuel Nevill ranked among the most important men 
of the province. He was a native of Stafford, England, and 
bred a lawyer in London, where for a time he edited a news- 
paper. The occasion of his coming to America was in this 
wise. One of the original proprietors was Arent Sonmans, a 
Hollander, who lived in Scotland. In addition to his own twenty- 
fourth part, he owned portions of the several shares that had been 
vested in Gawen Lawrie, David Barclay and Hugh Hartshome, 



142 Thic Story of an Old Fahm. 

which, together with simdry other portions that he had pur- 
chased, aggregated five and one-quarter proprieties. Sonraans, 
while preparing to visit East Jersey and while journeying 
between Scotland and London, was set upon by some highway- 
men and fjitally wounded. His son, Peter, inherited his Ameri- 
can interests and, coming to America in 1688, died in 1734, and 
lies buried in St. John's chm'chyard at Elizabeth. He devised 
his estates to his Avife, Sarah. At her death, which occurred 
soon after, Samuel Nevill, as her eldest brother and heir-at-law, 
came into possession of the five and one-quarter proprieties, 
excepting a small portion that had been sold )jy Peter Sonmans 
to John Vail. 

By this time these shares had groAvn to be of considera- 
ble value. Mr. Nevill, on finding himself possessed 6f such 
important American interests, decided to cross the ocean, 
which he did in 1736, settling permanently at Perth Amboy. 
His varied talents at once attracted attention, and he soon rose 
to eminence. The then great dignity of being the mayor of this 
ancient capital was forced upon him ; he became a member of 
the provincial assembly, judge of the court of common pleas, 
second judge of the supreme covu't, and in many other important 
ways served with honor the people and his king. Under the 
auspices of the assembly, between the years 1732 and 1761, he 
published in two volumes an edition of the laws of the province. 
In 1758, he established and edited the first of New Jersey's 
periodicals and the second one on the continent. It was called 
the "New American Magazine," to distinguish it from its pre- 
decessor at Philadelphia, which relinquished publication upon 
the appearance of this competitor. Nevill's magazine contained 
about forty octavo pages, and, judging from the copy to be seen 
in the library of the New York Historical Society, it compared 
favorably with many modern publications of the same character. 
It was printed at Woodbridge by James Parker, who, having 
served his time with the famous New York printer, William 
Bradford, had set up, in 1751, the first printing press in New 
Jersey. Besides the magazine he printed ^' Nevill's Laws," and 
Smith's "History of New Jersey " which appeared in 1765; from 
time to time he published legislative and other official docu- 
ments and did generally the work of the colony. 



How THE World Moves ! 143 

Samuel Nevill died on the twenty-seventh day of October^ 
1764, at the age of sixty-seven. He and his wife lie side by 
side under the shadows of the walls of St. Peter's, of which 
church he was a warden for twenty years. 

As before recited, the consideration for the purchase of the 
three hundred and sixty-seven acres was seven hundred and 
fifty-four poimds. Of this amount Johannes paid three hundred 
and twenty-four pounds in cash ; the balance by the execution and 
delivery of two bonds, payable in six months, for two hundred and 
two, andtwohundred and twenty-eight pounds. These obligations 
were discharged on maturity, and, as Leslie had died soon after 
the sale was consummated, they bear the satisfaction receipt of his 
two children, George and Elizabeth. Among my old papers relat- 
ing to this property are these two satisfied bonds. They are espec- 
ially valued as preserving excellent specimens of Johannes' writ- 
ing ; on one of them the sig- a 

nature is as plain and distinct fj L^ /^"l^ '^ ^' ^ 

as if penned within a few .^7y^'^C?^>^/>^^>^)r 
years. Here isafac-simile : >^ ^ ^ 

To the manuscript lover, much pleasure is derived from 
handling an old document that, having played its part in the work 
of the world, has in some mysterious way escaped the fate of like 
papers and is preserved to testify of circumstances and events of 
an age long past. How the world moves ! Consider the changes 
that have come to people and countries since these old bonds 
were new. When these instruments — now in the sere and yel- 
low, and valueless save as relics — were vested with the poten- 
tiality of enforcing the payment of a no inconsiderable sum, the 
land for which they had been given in part consideration was in 
truth as much of a howling wilderness as it had been for a thou- 
sand previous years. Lafayette, whose name was to be as fami- 
liar as household words in this hill country of New Jersey, was 
yet unborn. Washington, still unknown to fame, was a lad in 
his teens ; and seventeen years must come and go before the 
Corsican babe would open his eyes on that Europe he was almost 
to master. Travellers still crossed the stormy Atlantic in frail 
pinks, ketches, snows and bilenders. France was being pom- 
padoured into a condition to make possible the fourteenth of 
July, 1789. And what of England, then as now, considered in 



144 



The Story of an Old Farm. 



the van of civilization ? Its crown was worn by a Hanoverian 
dullard who hated '^busic and boetrj." In all the island there was 
not a macadamized road, and the royal mail was carried on ^^ fly- 
ing machines/' protected from highway robbers, even in the sub- 
urbs of London, by guards armed with loaded blunderbusses. 
Parliament was a den of corruption, borough seats in the house 
of commons being publicly advertised and openly sold. The 
British people knew but little of their law makers, as to publish 
the proceedings of their legislature was a misdemeanor carrying 
a heavy punishment. There were laws enough, however, and 
they were severe enough, for nearly two hundred crimes knew 
capital punishment as their penalty, and children of tender years 
were sentenced to death for petty pilfering. And yet we are 
constantly told that the world grows no better, that the move- 
ment and direction of mankind is not onward and upward. 




CHAPTER XL 

The Building of the " Old Stone House'^ — Redemptioners — 
White Slavery in the Colonies. 

Behold Johannes — the proud possessor of three hundred and 
sixty-seven fertile Bedminster acres ! land that has lain dormant 
for centuries, unconscious of its destiny, but ever ready and 
eager to smile into fruitfulness upon the first advances of the 
husbandman. In fancy we can see our German ancestor and his 
two stalwart sons betaking themselves to the hillside. Soon, 
crash after crash denote the falling oaks that the sturdy strokes 
and keen axes of the Moelichs have marked as the most fitting 
contributors to the sills, walls and gables of a new log house ; for 
temporary shelter is necessary while the more permanent stone 
dwelling shall be rearing its massive walls. 

Days are spent in the timber 5 tree after tree is attacked ; they 
fall on every side ! The undergrowth is cut down and heaped, 
and, by and by, the warm sunlight, for the first time perhaps in 
ages, breaks in upon a clearing of two acres, which from that 
time has been consecrated by the sorrows and gladnesses, 
rejoicings and repinings, and all the sympathetic experiences 
that rally around an enduring family homestead. The location 
is well chosen. Now that the trees are prostrate, it shows an 
open cheery slope, upon which the sun looks kindly down. The 
ascending uplands bar the chill north winds, and to the south and 
east the ground falls away gently to the meadows bor- 
dering the brook and river, which just here, with pleas- 
ant splash and babble, merge into one stream. Teams draw 
the big logs to the spot selected for placing the tem- 
porary dwelling. It was across the present road leading to 
the farm buildings, opposite and facing the door-yard of 
10 



146 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

the stone house. The ends of the logs are squared, and so cut 
as to be let in or dove-tailed together. And now comes the 
memorable day of the " raising." Old neighbors from Hunter- 
don are invited, and come in goodly numbers. They bring with 
them willing hearts and stout arms, and plenty of provisions, for, 
as there are no dwellings near, the raising dinner must par- 
take somewhat of the character of a picnic. Songs and merry 
stories go round, as the walls and gables slowly rise from the 
ground. How easy to imagine the happiness of Johannes, as he 
now aids in the work, and now directs his friends and 
co-laborers ! Mariah Katrina, too, is there, lending in the 
German fashion a strong and ready hand ; and the boys 
occupy themselves in keeping up brisk 'fires with fragrant chips, 
and crackling boughs and branches. Cannot you see the smil- 
ing, hear the laughing, and enjoy the joking, while they dine 
from off the logs and stumps, and drink to the future happiness 
of the new residents ? The walls go up apace ; by afternoon, 
skids are necessary upon which to roll the heavy logs to their 
places; and when the western sky beyond the crest of the long 
hill is aflame with the rich colors of the after-glow, the rude 
house is raised, though still without roof, doors or floor. When 
entirely completed it was nothing more than a square enclosure, 
with but one storey, and a cock-loft above, and a roof thatched, 
with leaves or straw — a primitive cabin, much like many others 
scattered along the narrow tracks and trails of this newly-opened 
country. 

As it was now late in the autumn, or early in the winter, noth- 
ing could be done in the actual erection of the stone house ", 
but during the cold weather much was accomplished in 
the way of preparation. He who in building a house calls in 
the aid of architect and artisan, and himself supplies only the 
money wherewith to pay for design and work, knows but little 
of the true sweetness of creating a homestead. Our ancestor 
must have felt to the full this supreme happiness, as with his 
boys he labored day after day in furthering the preparations for 
the building. Stones were hauled and dressed — a quarry having 
been opened iii the extreme northwest corner of the property ; 
materials were brought upon the ground, and round, straight trees 
selected and rough-hewed to the line, converting them into the 



A Redemptioner Stone-Mason. 147 

stanch, square floor timbers, that to-day, exposed in the ceiling of 
the living room, show no signs of decay — are sound to the core. 
With what interest must Johannes' wife and children have 
viewed the work, and how his heart must have leaped within 
him as they watched with delight the slow creating of the family 
nest. With the disappearance of frost the cellar under the west- 
em gable was excavated, and early in the spring the foundations 
were laid and the building was fairly under way. 

To assist in the construction, the services were secured — so 
runs the story — of Caspar Berger, a German stone-mason 
and a redemptioner. He had reached New York in 1744, 
and, being sold by the captain of his ship to repay the costs of 
passage, was purchased for a term of years by Cornelius Van 
Home, of White House, in Hunterdon county. John G. 
Van Houten of that place, whose wife was a granddaughter 
of Van Home, informed me, when eighty-four years of age, 
that he had often heard his wife's father say that after Cas- 
par Berger had served three years of his time he obtained his 
freedom by building three stone houses. One of them was for 
Cornelius Van Home at White House, now owned by Abraham 
Pickel ; and one for Abraham Pickel in the same neighborhood, 
now owned by William Pickel, a descendant. The third house, 
near-by, he believed, was " for a Melick," but could not remember 
the first name. As there is every probability that at this time 
Johannes was living between North Branch and White House vil- 
lagesjon the property afterward owned by Jacob Kline, it is reason- 
able to suppose that it was for him that this third house was built 5 
if so, no trace of the structure remains, although, as mentioned in 
a previous chapter, the descendants of Jacob Kline are still able 
to locate the spot where stood the Moelich homestead. Mr. Van 
Houten was confident in his statement that Berger also built a 
stone house in Bedminster township, Somerset county. Without 
doubt this last was the dwelling of Johannes Moelich ; as such a 
story is in full accord with the accepted beliefs of past genera- 
tions connected with the " Old Stone House." 

The descendants of Caspar Berger claim that his emigration 
from the old coimtry was involuntary ; he with others having 
been enticed on board a ship by its captain, who then set sail for 
America. This is not improbable, as the masters of vessels were 



148 The Story of an Old Farm. 

often guilty of cruel and unjust acts in this business of the 
importation of redemptioners. Isaac Weld, Jr., in his book of 
travels in America, published in the last century, asserts that it 
was the custom of ship-masters at Rotterdam and the Hanse 
towns to inveigle the people into their vessels under promise of 
free passage to America. On reaching the colonies, announce- 
ment of the arrival of mechanics and laborers would be made, 
and persons in want of such would flock to the ships, and the 
poor Germans would be sold to the highest bidders, the captains 
pocketing the proceeds. Caspar Berger, after obtaining his 
freedom, by his frugality and industry prospered in the new 
country and soon waxed well-to-do. During the Revolution he 
kept the Readington tavern, and later owned a large tract of 
land north of Holland brook ; the mill of William Fitch, on 
that stream, was also his property. At his death in 1817 he 
divided his homestead farm of four hundred acres at Readington 
between his three sons, Aaron, Peter and Jasper. Aaron's son, 
John S., now an old man, still owns and occupies a portion of 
this home farm. 

Redemptioners, or term slaves, as they were sometimes called, 
constituted^ in the early part of the eighteenth century a pecu- 
liar feature of colonial society. They were recruited from among 
all manner of people in the old world, and through this channel 
Europe emptied upon America, not only the virtuous poor and 
oppressed of her population, but the vagrants, felons, and the 
dregs of her communities. There was thus established among 
the iirst settlers, a society that, in many places, was almost 
imbued with a moral pestilence. In Section 10, page 275, 
"S. P. 0. Colonial Entry Book," number 92, we find the follow- 
ing recital : 

That all sturdy beggers as gipsies and other incorrigible rougues and wan- 
derers may be taken upp by constables and imprisoned until at the next Assizes 
or sessions they shall either beacquited and assigned to some settled aboade and 
course of life here, or be appointed to be sent to the plantations for five years 
under the conditions of servants. 

Among the redemptioners, however, were a fair proportion of 
sturdy souls, strong in purpose and endeavor, who appreciated 
the great opportunity created for them by this complete change 
of life and country. At the expiration of term of service, many 



Indented Servants and Free-Willers. 149 

by thrift and industry elevated themselves to a respectable 
position, and were absorbed in the middle class. Of necessity 
there were improvident and shiftless ones, who contributed to 
the vicious and ignorant element of the population. 

There were two kinds of redemptioners : " indented servants," 
who had bound themselves to their masters for a term of years 
previous to their leaving the old country 5 and '' free-willers," 
who, being without money and desirous of emigrating, agreed 
with the captains of ships to allow themselves and their families 
to be sold on arrival, for the captain's advantage, and thus repay 
costs of passage and other expenses. The former — indented ser- 
vants — were often trapped into their engagements by corrupt 
agents at home, who persuaded them to emigrate, under false 
promises of tender and humane treatment, and under assurances 
of remunerative employment at expiration of service. Section 
five of the "Colonial Entry Book," before referred to, testifies as 
follows in corroboration of the above statement : 

The waies of obtayning these servants have beene usually by employing a sorte 
of men and women who make it theire profession to tempt or gaine poore or 
idle persons to goe to the Plantations and having persuaded or deceived them 
on Shipp board they receive a reward from the person who employed them. 

The immigrants often discovered, on arrival, that the advan- 
tages represented to be obtained in America had been painted 
by the agents in much too alluring colors ; frequently their 
masters forced them to most rigid labor, and exercised an 
unnecessary severity. Edward Eddis, a surveyor of customs in 
the province of Maryland, in his "Letters from America," 
asserts that this class of servants often groaned beneath a worse 
than Egyptian bondage, as their masters, knowing that their 
servitude could last but for a few years, treated them with a 
rigor more severe than they extended to their negro slaves, to 
whom, being actual property, they were more lenient. 

The free-willers suffered even worse treatment at the hands 
of ship-masters and agents, who had inveigled them into emi- 
gration by false and specious promises. They were led to 
believe that on arrival in America their services would be 
eagerly solicited by parties who would gladly pay the cost of 
their passages ; which, being only nine pounds, the emigrants 



150 The Story of an Old Farm. 

would soon be able to repay, and thus secure their liberty, And 
all the enjoyments and prosperity that the new country offered 
to adventurers. Agreements were entered into whereby these 
deluded ones bound themselves, that if on arrival they did not 
succeed within a certain number of days in securing employment 
on their own conditions, they could be sold for a term of years to 
defray the charges for their passages. Alas ! the " free-willers," 
with rare exceptions, had a rude awakening on reaching the 
colonies. Under their agreements, the captains had a legal lien on 
the persons of the immigrants until the ship charges were paid ; 
consequently they were not allowed to go on shore, but were 
exposed to view on deck to the people who came on board in 
search of servants. Except in cases of extraordinary qualifica- 
tions, very few of them were happy enough to make their own 
stipulations. The sanguine expectations of the redemptioners 
were doomed to disappointment, and they found themselves sold 
for several years of tedious labor and servitude. 

Professor Kalm, the Swedish botanist, reached Philadelphia on 
the seventh of September, 1748, by the ship "Mary," which had 
on board twenty-three Germans and their families. He narrates 
that when about going on shore with his captain, the latter turned 
to the second mate and strictly charged him "to let no one of the 
German refugees out of the ship unless he paid for his passage, or 
somebody else paid for him, or bought him." Masters of vessels 
often acted with needless cruelty toward their bond-passengers. 
Published accounts of travels in America during the last cen- 
tury frequently tell sad stories of the enforced separation of hus- 
bands from wives, and parents from children. Doctor Ernest 
Otto Hopp, in a book on German slavery in North America, 
recently published in Berlin, tells of a ship captain by the name 
of Heerbrand who acquired a great reputation as a kidnapper 
of poor Germans for the American market. He had in his pay 
a number of men whose business it was to regularly steal beg- 
gars, vagabonds and other people without connections, he paying 
the captors two florins a head for each victim delivered at his 
vessel. It is said that this man brought over six hundred such 
persons to America. 

The terms and conditions of service differed in the different 
colonies. Among the archives of the Pennsylvania Historical 



Colonial Laws Regarding Redemptioners. 151 

Society, are some original bonds, or agreements, between ship 
captains and redemptioners. From them we learn that the 
usual price paid in that colony, for three years' service, was 
twenty-one pounds, one shilling and six pence. When his time 
had expired a man was entitled to receive two suits of clothes, a 
grubbing hoe, a weeding hoe and a new axe. Children sold 
for from eight to ten pounds, and their masters were required to 
see that they were taught to read and write, and had, at least, 
one quarter's schooling. In New Jersey — according to " Leam- 
ing and Spicer " — no white servant, if sold or bound after seven- 
teen years of age, could serve above four years. If under that 
age, they were to be free on reaching their majority. At the 
expiration of service their masters were obliged to supply them 
with two good suits of clothing, suitable for a servant, one good 
falling axe, one good hoe, and seven bushels of Indian corn. 
A servant was to be immediately freed in case of being so abused 
by master or mistress as to result in the loss of an eye or a tooth. 
The laws against aiding redemptioners to escape were very severe. 
A fine of five pounds was imposed for offering assistance in such 
cases, and the aider and abettor were obliged to make full 
satisfaction to master or mistress for all loss or damage sustained 
by the absence of, or search for, the runaway. Any one who con- 
cealed or entertained an absconding redemptioner, could be fined 
at the discretion of the court, and be made to pay ten shillings 
to the owner for each day that they had harbored the servant. 
It was not uncommon for thrifty Germans, who were possessed 
of enough money to pay their passages and defray the first 
cost of settling, to allow themselves to be advantageously, and 
on favorable terms, sold. This was in order that during their 
servitude they might have an opportunity of learning the lan- 
guage and of growing familiar with the manners, customs and 
institutions of the country. Advertisements announcing redemp- 
tioners for sale are frequently to be found in newspapers of the 
last century. One in the ''Pennsylvania Messenger" of the fourth 
of April, 1776, offers for sale : 

A young girl and raa id-servant, strong and healthy ; no fault. She is not 
qualified for the service now demanded. Five years to serve. 

The same paper, on the eighteenth of January, 1774, contains 
the following notice: 



152 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Germans — we are now offering fifty Germans just arrived — to be seen at the 
Golden Swan, kept by the widow Kreider. The lot includes schoolmasters, 
artisans, peasants, boys and girls of various ages, all to serve for payment of 
passage. 

It seems rather odd that schoolmasters should be offered for 
sale in the market. You would think that they would have been 
eagerly sought for, but, on the contrary, they appear to have 
been a drug, as is shown by D. von Biilow in a book published in 
Berlin, in 1797. He says: 

It is easy to sell the farmers, but there are often men whom it is not so easy to 
dispose of, e. g., officers and scholars. I have seen a Kussian captain offered for 
sale eight days, and not a bid made. He had absolutely no market value. It 
was of no use for his owner to put him up again and again, to offer to make fifty 
per cent, discount. " He is good for nothing," was all the answer to the offer. 
The captain of the ship then liad him walked about the town to show, but in 
vain. After waiting several weeks, he was finally sold at a ridiculously low 
price as a village schoolmaster. 

On this subject Doctor Hopp recites that Pastor Kunz of 
Philadelphia, related that in 1773 he was beginning to econo- 
mize in order to get together twenty pounds, as he wanted to buy 
a German student for a teacher. 

As late as September, 1786, the following advertisement 
appeared in the '' Pittsbui'gh Gazette " : 

To be sold. (For ready money only.) A German woman servant. She has 
near three years to serve, and is well qualified for all household work : would 
recommend her to her own country people, particularly, as her present master 
has found great inconvenience from liis not being acquainted with their manners, 
customs and language. For further particulars enquire at Mr. Ormsby's in 
.Pittsburgh. 

In looking back on the many peculiarities, changes and grad- 
ations of society in New Jersey's colonial days, it is curious to 
note how the well-to-do immigrants, who brought with them, or 
purchased after arrival, redemption servants, often lost the 
prestige of their affluence ; being unable in the new country to 
maintain their rank and influence. Their humble servitors, 
however, inured by hardship and labor to the stern necessities 
of colonial existence, prospered and throve. The bonds-people, 
after serving their time, acquired by diligence and saving lands 
and homes ; it was not uncommon in the second generation to 
find them taking, in every w^ay, precedence to the children of 
the master who had owned their time during their first years in 



Mariah Katrina Carries Mortar on Her Head. 153 

the country. The affluent immigrant, having been accustomed 
to ease, proved unequal to the struggle ; and his children, 
through faulty and ignorant education, rapidly deteriorated. — 
Enough of redemptioners ! 

Among the many odd tales of early days at the '' Old Stone 
House," which have enliv^ened winter evenings around the great 
fire-place in the living room, is the legend that at its building, 
Johamies' wife, Mariah Katrina, carried mortar, balanced on her 
head, to the masons at work on the walls. A very exalted posi- 
tion, you may ironically say, in which to place one's great-great- 
grandmother ; but these chapters are supposed to preserve tradi- 
tions as well as facts, and the writer must put to one side any 
predilections he may have, as to the matter to be presented. 
Members of the family, whose pride may rebel against belief in 
this story, are at liberty to consider it fable ; but the mortar, at 
least, must be accepted, for to this day it is as solid and imper- 
vious as the stones between which it lies. Builders of the pres- 
ent aver that its manufacture is a lost art, and that all of its 
component parts are not known. Visitors to this ancestral dwel- 
ling, who, after passing under the wide circumference of the old 
maple's shade, climb the hill, until they stand in the presence of 
the structure's kindly and venerable front, can attribute to this 
mortar the fact that it exists to-day. It has been the agent 
which has enabled these massive walls to withstand for nearly 
a century and a half of winters, the wear and tear of time ; and 
it still binds their stones together in one compact mass of 
masonry, which, without doubt, will continue to bear up bravely 
against the assaults of many years to come. Great-great-grand- 
mother Moelich figures, traditionally, again, at the building of 
the house. She is said to have vigorously protested against the 
introduction of so many windows — they are ridiculously few and 
small. The good woman had probably not forgotten the window- 
tax of the old country, and had in mind, perhaps, the possibility 
of such an impost being levied in New Jersey. 

By early in the summer the house must have been completed. 
Very plain, both as to exterior and interior, with no fan-lighted 
door-heads, or ambitious columns, pilasters and carvings. Yet, 
as we view it to-day, its solid simplicity is truly architectural, 
for it bears on its every feature a dignified expression of truth — 



154 The Story of an Old Farm. 

of being only what it claims to be, an humble farmhouse of 
simple utilitarian porportions and fashion, the general effect of 
whose eaves, roof-tree, double Dutch doors, hall and chambers, 
but express the purposes of its construction. It is not altogether 
without picturesqueness. Bedded in the gueen of its surround- 
ing elms, its wooden-seated porch, sloping roof and rough stone 
gables coated with lime and pebbles, present a homely picture 
of comfort and domesticity, in full accord with its setting of 
turfy hillsides and verdure-clad meadows. To one who appre- 
ciates in a structure the beauty of simplicity and appropriate- 
ness, the ''Old Stone House" must ever be a delightful object. 
To those of us who claim kinship with its early builder, this 
ancestral home will always be a place of jealous regard ; a spot 
where will linger reminiscences of former days, and traditions of 
by-gone generations ; of men and women whose names have been 
associated with the sturdy walls and hospitable atmosphere of 
this brave old dwelling. 

The huge German locks, with their exposed and complicated 
mechanism, were fastened to the doors ; heavy pieces of furni- 
ture were placed in the rooms, one, at least, the stupendous 
Dutch cupboard, occupying to-day its original position ; clean 
white sand from the brook was spread on the floors, and the 
great crane was himg in the deep-chested fire-place. Mariah 
Katrina, as priestess of the household, has put the first torch to 
the hickory boughs on the hearthstone ; the crackling flames 
leap up the broad chimney, while wreaths of curling smoke soar 
heavenward, seemingly bearing in their pungent odors an 
incense of thanksgiving. The tea-kettle, suspended over the 
fire, sings its cheery note — the bubbling pot with savory breath 
joins in the chorus — the procession of generations of good-cheer 
has commenced. Let us conceive the table spread in the living- 
room, and the members of the family gathered about the board 
for their first meal in the " Stone House." While regaling them- 
selves with creature-comforts from the good wife's newly-stocked 
larder, if ever faces could be said to reflect content, so must 
have theirs, as they congratulated each other on the comfort ot 
their surroundings. And in the evening — believing, as we do, , 
in the deep religious feeling that controlled all the thoughts and 
actions of the sire, we need not doubt the erection of a family 




GO 

o 



The Bedminster House Completed. 



155 



altar ; nor, that at the close of this all-important day, with a 
heart overflowing with thankfulness, and a voice choked with 
emotion, Johannes' devout prayers of praise and dedication, 
borne on the wings of faith, ascended to the Most High ; to 
that kind Providence who had guarded and guided him and his, 
through the vicissitudes of all the year since leaving Germany, 
bringing them at last in safety to the repose of a happy home on 
this peaceful Bedminster hillside. 




CHAPTER XII. 

Johannes Goes to the Post Office — JBedminster and the Adja- 
cent Townships in 1752. 

Just here it may be well to survey the appearance presented by 
Somerset county and East New Jersey at the time the Moelichs 
took possession of the " Old Farm." In no better way can we 
do this than by — in fancy — accompanying Johannes to Perth 
Amboy, thirty miles away. He is going to see if John Fox, the 
postmaster, has a letter for him from the old country ; for be it 
known that in the year of grace, 1752, the province boasts of 
but three post offices — one at Amboy, one at Trenton, and one 
at Burlington. Letters were left at those places by the Phila- 
delphia mail carrier, weekly in summer and once in two weeks 
during the winter ; rather meagre facilities for the people, but 
they had to be contented until 1 754, when the service was consid- 
erably increased. In December, 1733, the following notice 
appeared in the Philadelphia "Weekly Mercury ": " There are a 
number of letters in the post office at Perth Amboy for persons 
living in Somerset, Monmouth and Essex counties." 

To us of the present day, Johannes would have presented a 
striking appearance, as, mounted on a stout cob, he clattered 
down the incline upon which he had built the new stone house, 
and turned west up the long hill. He is now over fifty 3'ears of 
age, with a figure not tall, but robust, having a high color, blue 
eyes, and, had the fashion of the day allowed, the whole would 
have been supplemented by an abundant reddish brown beard. 
His German origin is still readily recognized, though many of 
his foreign characteristics have been lost. He speaks English, 
but not with the facility of the mother tongue, and his dress is 
that of a well-to-do colonial yeoman. A coarse grey coat with 



Johannes in the Saddle. 157 

generous skirts cut square, buttons across his brawny chest, not 
hiding an ample leather waistcoat. His breeches, also of leather, 
meet at the knee stout blue yarn stockings, drawn over a pair 
of sturdy calves, which are further protected by deer-skin leg- 
gings extending over his buckled shoes. A short grey wig 
and a three-cornered hat complete his decently picturesque 
appearance, while his further belongings comprise a fresh cut 
whip of sapling, and a pair of saddle-bags suspended on either 
side of the horse. 

As he climbs the hiU and overlooks his broad acres, he turns 
in the saddle for a good-bye glance at the new house resting so 
cosily against its sunny bank. What wonder, that as he rides 
through the fresh dewy morning air his face glows with satis- 
faction ! We can well imagine it because of his thoughts dwell- 
ing on the pleasant surroundings of his newly established home, 
and on the peaceful promise it seems to give for the future, as 
compared with the unhappy uncertainties of the Grerman life he 
had known on the banks of the far distant Rhine. Johannes' 
first thirteen years in America have been preparatory, and 
to an extent, migratory ; but now he feels about him the atmos- 
phere of an abiding home. He recognizes and appreciates that 
he is no longer a pioneer, but a permanent member of a commu- 
nity, where each individual has an interest in the common 
wealth, and in the continued growth and improvement of the 
neighborhood. Here he expects to end his days — here be 
buried ; and here he hopes his children will live, and their gen- 
erations prosper. 

The road Johannes traveled was but little more than a broad 
path cut through the woods ; the trees pressed close on either 
side of the ruts and wheel tracks, often the bark of the flanking 
oaks and hickories showing the marks made by the hubs of 
passing vehicles. It must have been pleasant riding along for 
miles under the arching branches, the air surcharged with 
the balsam of the aromatic breath of thousands of acres of giant 
trees : monarchs of the forest that for centuries had towered 
over the hills and dales, enriching the ground with their yearly 
falling leaves, till the soil, rank with vitality, only needed the 
warm sun and man's command, to blossom into fields of abund- 
ance. Occasionally, on the roads emerging from its long green 



158 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

arcade, our traveller came upon isolated dwellings, seated amid 
little clearings, from which, in many instances, the stumps had 
not yet disappeared. The smoke that gently curled heaven- 
ward from the chimneys of these dwellings perfiuned the morn- 
ing air with the odors of burning fresh-cut wood— such smoke as 
can only come from firesfed by glowing oaken back-logs and crack- 
ling hickory boughs, over which the good-wife has swung the great 
black kettle. These rude homes of new settlers were few, however ; 
population had been very slow in })enetrating this portion of 
Somerset. The country lay in a broad and almost unbroken 
extent of fertile waste, with but infrequent traces of human habi- 
tation discernible. As the grass covers a rolling meadow, mant- 
ling it in continuous green, so the forest buried the Bedminster 
and Bridgewater hills and valleys in vast midulations of leafy 
verdure. From the Morris county line on the north to the 
Raritan river at Bound Brook on the south ; from Bernards on 
the east to Hunterdon on the west, the whole area was a broad 
expanse of woodland wilderness, the continuity of green being- 
interrupted here and there by a few houses clustering as an 
embryo village, while an occasional interval, open to the sun, 
marked the germ of a future farm. 

At Pluckamin the nucleus of a society was forming ; and at 
Lamington — a corruption of the more majestic Indian name, 
Allamehmk — the Presbyterians had erected a church edifice in 
1740, though services had been held in a barn for several pre- 
ceding years. Among the earlier members of the congregation 
were William Hoagland, Jacobus Van der Veer, Henry Sloane, 
Ephraini McDowell, John Craig, William Logan, Richard Por- 
ter, Peter Demun, Thomas Van Horn, Mathias Lane and Guisbert 
Sutphen. At this time the church building had just been 
enlarged, and the pastor of the congregation was the Reverend 
James McCrea, he having in 1740, accepted a call from the 
congregation known as that of ^' Lametunk, Lebanon, Peapack, 
Readington and Bethlehem." He was the father of that Jennie 
McCrea, whose tragic death on the upper Hudson in the year 
1777 by the tomahawks of Burgoyne's treacherous Indian 
allies, was to send a thrill of horror throughout the entire country. 
Though much of Bedminster remained in a state of nature, 
beyond its borders, in adjacent townships, communities had been. 



The Settlement of Bernards Township. 159 

planted and many acres of farming lands were cleared. On the 
north the settlement of Morristown by people from Newark and 
New England dated from early in the century, and its Presby- 
terian church had been established since 1738, the year of the 
organization of the county. Until about that time the neighbor- 
hood had been known as West Hanover, the first record of the 
new name, Morristown, being found in an order of the court of 
general sessions of the peace dated the twenty-fifth of March, 
1740. 

By the year 1713 squatters' cabins existed at Roxiticus, now 
Mendham — the original settlers being Byrams, Drakes, Cooks, 
Careys, Thompsons and others. Its first tavern, afterwards the 
famous '^ Black Horse," was kept by a By ram, and the oldest 
stone in the graveyard perpetuates the name of Stephen Cook, 
who died in 1749. Its Presbyterian congregation is first men- 
tioned in 1738, in connection with New Brunswick. In this 
year, 1752, the congregation, under the pastorate of Eliab 
Byram, possessed a small frame church building which must 
have been erected previous to 1745, as in that year it, together 
with its site, was conveyed by deed of Edward Burnet. He may 
have been a good man, but he surely was an evil speller. He 
describes himself in the conveyance, "• Edmon Burnnant of 
Rocksiticus in yere County of Summerset in east nu Jareses in 
Amaracah." The description of the premises conveyed begins, 
"Scairteen pees of parsel of land on which the meeting hows 
Now Standeth." 

Basking Ridge, in Bernards township, already possessed a 
flourishing community with a well-established Presbyterian 
church under the charge of a Scotch worthy, the Reverend 
Samuel Kennedy. His education had been gained at Edin- 
burgh University, and coming to America, he was in 1751 
ordained pastor of this congregation, which he faithfully served 
for thirty-six years at a salary of one hundred and ten pounds. 
In addition to his ministerial duties he practiced medicine, and 
established and took charge of a classical school which attained 
to great celebrity. Authorities differ as to the time that Bask- 
ing Ridge and Bernards township were first settled. By some it 
is claimed that a Scotch congregation and a log church were in 
existence in the year 1700. Doctor John C. Rankin, in his 



160 The Story of an Old Farm. 

published '^ Historical Discourse," very properly asserts that there 
could have been no church before there were inhabitants. He 
goes on to show that it was not until the year 1717 that John 
Harrison, acting as agent for the proprietors of East New Jer- 
sey, purchased Indian rights to about three thousand acres, 
embracing the site of the village, and much of the territory occu- 
pied by the present congregation. John Harrison will be remem- 
bered as one of the benefactors of St. Peter's church at Perth 
Amboy, his name appearing with those of George Willocks and 
Thomas Gordon on a tablet affixed to its walls. This tract, pur- 
chased from the natives, was subsequently sold to and divided 
between four purchasers, one of whom was James Alexander, 
the surveyor-general of New Jersey and the father of Lord Stir- 
ling. Alexander's portion embraced between six and eight hun- 
dred acres of land of great beauty and fertility. This was the 
property that his son William, in 1761, on his return from Eng- 
land, after his futile eftbrts to secure an earldom, improved until 
it blossomed into his great estate, with a fine mansion, rich gar- 
dens and a park stocked with deer. 

The first actual settlers of Basking Ridge seem to have come 
about the time of Harrison's purchase. By 1720 the recorded 
names appear of James Pitney, Henry Rolfe, and John Ayres. 
The latter came from Woodbridge, New Jersey, though born at 
Newbury, Massachusetts, from which place he migrated, as a 
child, with his father, Obadiah. He died in 1732, and left 
seven sons, who all lived in the neighborhood, and became active 
members of the church and community. In 1731, John Ayres 
conveyed to James Pitney, Mordecai McKenne, George Pack, 
Samuel Rolfe, Daniel Morris, Thomas Riggs and Obadiah Ayres, 
trustees, one and one-half acres of land, in the centre of which, 
surrounded by a grove of trees, stood a log meeting-house. This 
primitive structure was superseded, in 1747, by a frame edifice 
that remained standing for ninety years. The oldest gravestone 
in the churchyard records the death of Henry Haines, on the 
ninth of June, 1736. There was at this time living in Bernards 
township one Abraham Southard, who in the previous year had 
migrated with eight children from Hempstead, Long Island. His 
coming had insured to Somerset, in the future a citizen who was 
to prove a great honor to the state. His son Henry, who was 



The Bedminster Van der Veers. 161 

born in 1747, lived at Basking Ridge until he died at the age of 
ninety-five, having had thirteen children. One of them, Samuel 
L. Southard, lived to have a national reputation as one of Amer- 
ica's greatest statesmen. Henry Southard, the father, also 
served faithfully and well his state and country. For eight 
years he was a member of the legislature, and for twenty-one a 
representative in congress. Before he retired from that body 
he saw his distinguished son a United States senator, and 
met him at a meeting of the joint committees of the two 
houses. The father and son were chairmen of their respective 
committees — a circumstance, as it has been said, without par- 
allel in the political history of our country. 

We have already learned how New Germantown was thriving 
in the west, and toward the south in the direction of White 
House were comfortable homesteads and cultivated lands. But 
as Johannes rode toward the Raritan he traversed almost a 
wooded solitude. As yet there were no signs of the hamlet of the 
Lesser Cross Roads, the only houses in that vicinity being the 
one of logs of John Burd, near where '^ Demund's bridge" now 
spans the north branch of the Raritan, and a similar structure, occu- 
pied by William Hoagland, standing on George Leslie's land west 
of the line of the '^ Old Farm." The road from Bernards ville to 
Lamington had been marked out since 1741, but was a mere 
trail, and but little travelled. South of this road the forest con- 
tinued with hardly a break to Pluckamin. In the territory 
lying between the two rivers — the Axtell tract — there was thus 
far but meagre settlement. Without much doubt a log house 
was standing where now lives Henry Ludlow (below Bedmin- 
ster church). It is known that about the year 1760, Jacobus 
Van der Veer built the house now occupied by Mr. Ludlow. 
He had purchased the land of William Axtell — two hundred and 
sixty acres fronting on the north branch of the Raritan — 
some time between 1746 and 1752 ; the records do not show the 
exiact date, but it must have been before the time of which we 
write, as he was a resident in 1751. In that year he was 
appointed a commissioner of the highways — an office that could 
not have been attended with very laborious duties. He was 
a great-grandson of Cornelius Jansse Van der Veer, who, emi- 
grating from Alckmarr in the province of North Holland, aforti- 
11 



162 The Story of an Old Farm. 

fied city of about ten thousand people, landed from the ship 
" Otter " in February, 1659, and settled at Flatbush, Long 
Island. This emigrant's son Dominicus migrated to some point 
in the Raritan valley, and one of his sons. Jacobus, who married 
Femmetje Stryker, was the father of the Bedniinster Jacobus 
Van der Veer, and also of that Elias, who some years later 
improved the water-power north of Pluckamin, thus establishing 
what has ever since been a county landmark — Van der Veer's 
mills. 

Some distance west of the Van der Veer land, still on the 
Axtell tract, was another clearing, in which stood a newly 
erected log house. It was the home of Ephraira McDowell, who 
on the first of May, 1750, purchased of William Axtell two hun- 
dred and thirty acres of land, a portion of which is still owned 
and occupied by his descendants. A few years later a 
frame dwelling with shingled sides succeeded the original 
log cabin ; it stood for seventy -five years, one of its rooms being 
the birth place of three successive generations. Five genera- 
tions have been welcomed to this ancestral home. Ephraira 
jNIcDowell died, and was buried in Lamington churchyard, in 
1762. The posterity of this sturdy Scotch-Irish Presbyterian 
have left indelible marks of their individuality and strength of 
character on the society of this and other states. None more so 
than his grandsons, John and William, who as the pastors of 
the Presbyterian churches of Morristown and Elizabeth were, 
we are told, the means of the conversion of three thousand souls. 

At this time there was no bridge where the Pluckamin road 
crosses the north branch of the Raritan. The river was often too 
high to be forded, as in those early days when the country was 
invested as a garment with heavy timber, all of the streams flowed 
much greater volumes of water. At such times travellers south- 
ward were obliged to cross the river near Mine brook, or often as 
far north as Peapack brook, and thus make their way through 
•Bernards township. On reaching Pluckamin Johannes found 
there about a dozen small houses and a tavern. This inn was 
the first place of entertainment established in the township ; it 
was built in 1750 by Jacob Eofi", who was one of the pioneers of 
the village. He was a native of Holland, and early in the last 
century purchased five hundred acres of land of the heirs of 



Pluckamin in 1752. 163 

John Johnstone, which included the present site of Pluckamin. 
His tavern remained standing for sixty-four years, its location 
being the corner now occupied by the house of Joseph D. 
Nevius. During the Revolution it was the meeting place for 
the committee of safety, and when Washington's army was quar- 
tered in this and adjoining counties its boniface dispensed 
hospitality to many of the leading men of the country. After 
Jacob's death the tavern was kept by his maiden sister Sarah, 
who, in turn, was succeeded by Jacob's son Christian ; he 
abandoned the old structure to his brother Cornelius, who occu- 
pied it as a residence. Christian built on the opposite corner — the 
present tavern site — a long, low building called the " Barracks." 
Here he waxed famous as a popular host. With the best society 
of New York and Philadelphia, this landlord's name became 
synonymous with good living ; and summer visitors to Schooley's 
mountain — a watering-place then in its glory — always arranged 
that the night necessarily spent on the journey should be passed 
at Christian Eojff's tavern. Aristocratic coaches with the 
family arms emblazoned on their panels, and drawn by four and 
six horses were not uncommon in those good old days in this 
quaint village of Pluckamin. In the foundation wall of the 
public house, destroyed within a few years by fire and which 
took the place of the ''Barracks," is a stone bearing the date 
1750, which was taken from the walls of the original tavern 
built by Jacob Eoff. 

Of the twelve houses standing at the time of our ancestor's rid- 
ing through the village, four are believed to be still extant. The 
one recently known as the Parker house was occupied by John 
Boylan — afterwards Pluckamin's first store-keeper, who was 
called " Captain Bullion." He was a contemporary of Jacob Eoff, 
whose daughter at the age of fifteen became his wife. Mrs. 
Boylan lived to the good old age of ninety-five, surviving 
her husband fifty years ; Mrs. Sarah Parker, the late owner of 
the house, was her daughter. Another of the original dwellings 
still preserved to us is the one known as the Harmer house, and 
owned by John Fenner, Jr. In Johannes' day it was the resi- 
dence of Matthew Lane, whose family settled about 1748 on the 
north branch of the Raritan, east of Van Vleits' mills. The old 
Losey dwelling, in which Jacob Losey kept the post office from 
1830 to 1860, is also said to have been built as early as 1 752. 



164 The Story of an Old Farm. 

A few years later settlers began to multiply in the vicinity of 
Pluckamin, but at this time the inhabitants of the neighborhood 
were not many. Colonel William McDaniels, as early as 1744, 
owned a large tract of land and a saw-mill, on the north branch 
of the Raritan, where are now Kline's mills. South of this property 
resided in the same year George and Jerry Reemer ; the name 
of the former appears among the contributors to the fund for 
building St. Paul's church, in 1756. On the east side of 
the river, on part of the tract (Winder) that George Wil- 
locks sold to Daniel Axtell, lived George Teeple and his 
sons, John and Christopher. He emigrated from Germany as 
early as 1700, and his grandson William was living recently in 
Pluckamin at an advanced age. The records show George 
Teeple to have been living in the township in 1745, and his 
name and that of his son John also appear, in 1756, as sub- 
scribers to the building of St. Paul's Lutheran church. From 
a gravestone in the churchyard we learn that John married 
Margaret Castncr on the tenth of January, 1756, and after liv- 
ing together for fifty-seven years they died within three hours 
of each other on the seventeenth of March, 1813, and were 
buried in the same grave. John Wortman, a native of Holland, 
in 1750 bought five hundred acres of land located west of 
Pluckamin on the road leading to Burnt mills, upon which he 
erected a long, one and a half storey, Dutch structure. The 
present Schoonmaker dwelling, recently remodelled, embraces a 
part of the original Wortman homestead, and is consequently 
one of the oldest houses in the township. 

It is fair to presume that Johannes dismounted at Eoffs tavern 
to wish Jacob '■"gntcn morgen,^^ and discuss with him the quality 
of some of his best Jamaica. It will be seen, as we proceed with 
the telling of our story, that the Moelichs, both father and son, 
were intimately associated with the early citizens of this vicinity. 
Among their old documents and miscellaneous papers in the 
hands of the writer are many on which appear the signatures 
of the Eoffs, Teeples, Wortmans, McDonalds, Van der Veers 
and other Pluckamin worthies. It is to be regretted that Johan- 
nes, in this and other visits to the village, did not ascertain and 
transmit to his posterity the origin of its name. It has long 
been a vexed question, and has served as a subject for many 



Origin of the Name Pluckamin. 165 

arguments and communications. A popular belief among the 
villagers is that this strange cognomen was occasioned by the 
assiduously-acquisitive habits of an early innkeeper, who, in his 
eagerness to secure customers, would '^ Pluck -'em-in." This 
ancient tavern-porch tale is an antiquated joke, and, without 
doubt, dates back to the founding of the village. The same 
mythical tavern-keeper has been found at Mendham, (Fll-Mend- 
em), New Jersey, and in Tarrytown, New York. No one, how- 
ever, has ever known his name, or in what year he flourished. 

By many, '■'■ Plaque mine^^ has been considered the proper 
spelling of the word, there being such a town in France, and one 
in the French portion of the Louisiana low-lands. I have long 
been persuaded that the name, in its present form, is the result 
of the linguistic efforts of our Dutch, German and English fore- 
fathers to spell and pronounce an Indian word. It is repeatedly 
written Blockhemen in the old German archives of Zion church. 
In the year 1885, when Edward Eggleston was engaged in 
researches among the manuscripts of the British museum 
in London, I wrote him, asking if he would endeavor to 
discover some trace of the word Pluckamin. I had thought 
it possible the name might appear among the minor ham- 
lets of Somersetshire, from which we have received the 
names of Bridgewater and Bedminster. His reply, under date 
of September sixteenth of that year, was as follows : 

I have tried in vain in tlie best Englisli gazeteers to find Pluckamin. I think 
it may be a corruption of Puckamin, which, I believe, though I cannot be sure, 
was a dialect form of the Algonquin, Putchamin, corrupted by our ancestors to 
persimmon, the fruit of that name. This seems like a wild conjecture, but I think 
it is the solution. At any rate, the name is Indian, I doubt not. 

As the present county-seat did not come into existence until 
nearly half a century later, there was at this time no road lead- 
ing from Pluckamin in the direction of Somerville. The county 
of Somerset was first erected and set off from Middlesex in 1688, 
but for twenty-five years after, it had no courts of its own, relying 
upon Middlesex for the administration of justice. The first 
court-house and jail was erected some time between the years 
1714 and 1717, at Six Mile Run, the buildings standing about 
three hundred feet east of the present church in that village, 
where its foundation stones can still be discovered. Tliis struc- 



166 The Story of an Old Farm. 

ture being destroyed by fire in 1737, the county-seat was 
removed to Hillsborough (Millstone), where a new court-house 
and jail were erected. This last building was destroyed 
by the British in 1779, the remains of its foundation being 
still in existence. In 1783 the county erected a tem- 
porary court-house and a log jail at Tunison's tavern, or 
Raritan. The former stood just east of the present court-house 
grounds, where in 1798 permanent county buildings were 
erected. This gave a great impetus to settlement in the neigh- 
borhood, which three years later assumed the name of Somer- 
ville. The road upon which our rider pursued his way followed 
a more easterly course, and ran along the edge of the mountains 
to Middlebrook, or Bomid Brook. Below Pluckamin was a tract 
of four hundred and seventy acres belonging to William 
McDonald, who had recently built on the ravine of Chambers 
brook a mill that ground the grists of Bedminster people until 
after the Revolution. Upon crossing this tract the road plunged 
directly into the forest, and from there on was but little more 
than a bare wagon track. 

Let us imagine Johannes traversing this shady way. As he 
puffs his pipe and rides musingly along, he gives rein to his steed, 
and abandons himself to agreeable reflection. While his mind 
dwells on the future grain fields, barns, mills and improvements 
in contemplation for the Bedminster hillside, he turns his horse 
on the soft green moss that carpets either side of the trail, 
and, as he slowly moves on between the stately trees, breathes 
with delight the cool sweet breath of grass and leaves and forest. 
Now he threads a little bridle path or cut-off, which leaving the 
highway runs under a mass of foliage, through which wild 
honeysuckles and blossoming grape-vines clamber from bush to 
tree, filling the air with their fragrance. On every side the 
shadowy dells and bosky bowers are vocal with the sweetest 
of nature's music, the chirping, twittering and singing of early 
summer birds. On the branches overhead saucy grey squirrels, 
with a whisk of their spasmodic tails, scurry up the tree trunks 
to safer altitudes, from where they peer down on the horse- 
man below through a curtain of trembling leaves. Perhaps a 
bear, with its awkward cubs, shuffles across the trail before him, 
or a startled red deer bounds away through the glades of the 



The Great Raritan Road. 167 

forest, disappearing in its sombre distances. There were other 
beasts and game at this time frequenting the quietudes of these 
Phickamin hills, for we know that in 1730 a law was passed in 
the province offering a bounty of twenty shillings for full grown 
wolves, five shillings for whelps not able to prey, and fifteen 
shillings for panthers. Notwithstanding this inducement for the 
extirpation of wolves, they seem to have grown more numerous, 
as, in 1751, an act was passed increasing the bounty to sixty 
shillings, and to ten shillings for whelps. 

And now the thicket and undergrowth recede ; the ground 
falls away, and the trail descending to the broad level of the 
Raritan loses itself in the ^' Great Raritan Road," which had 
been the thoroughfare of early colonial travel since the year 
1700. It commenced at a point on the north bank of the river, 
opposite New Brunswick, and following the stream to its branches 
extended west to the Delaware. Here Johannes finds the 
already old village of Bound Brook (Middlebrook), its loca- 
tion then, as now, being one of much natural beauty. Seated on 
the grassy banks of the Raritan, it overlooks that stream just 
where with a graceful bend it sweeps to the south, and so 
makes its deepening way through a fertile valley to the sea. 




CHAPTER XIII. 

Bound Brook in the Olden Time — The Baritan Valley 

in 1752. 

Bound Brook has of late years grown familiar to the travel- 
ling public, owing to the name being used to designate one of the 
prominent railway routes to Philadelphia. Trains by this line, 
while taking their hurried flight across the state, pause for a few 
moments at the entrance door to this old village. Their passen- 
gers look from the car windows with curious eyes upon the 
ancient settlement sequestered amid its venerable trees ; but few 
of them appreciate that their glances rest on a place that has 
been the theatre of colonial and Revolutionary scenes of much 
historic interest ; and on a locality whose name dates away back 
to the year 1666. 

To one fond of the beautiful in nature this valley of the Rari- 
tan abounds in rural loveliness. It is but its superficial charm. 
He who has an appetite for the quaint and old, and is eager to 
discover localities around which memories of the past cluster 
thickly, finds much along this river upon which to feed his 
antiquarian tastes. Its associations are among the oldest in New 
Jersey — none more so, save those of the Hudson and the Dela- 
ware. After the establishment of the capital of the province at 
Perth Amboy in 1682, the Scotch and English soon made their 
way northerly as far as the forks of the Raritan. Long before 
this time the Dutch had been quick to discover the agri- 
cultural promises of this favored region. These pioneers, 
toiling in the vanguard of settlement, while making their way 
through the thick gloom of the woods bordering the river were 
attracted by the intervals of broad meadow-spaces, horizoned by 
zones of forest and rich in abundant grasses. Under the 



The Genesis of Bound Brook. 169 

shadow of their bordering trees often stood Indian cabins, for 
the red men had used these savannas for raising com, beans, and 
pumpkins. The Hollanders had good cause for rejoicing at 
finding in the dense woods lands destitute of trees and ready at 
once for the plow. The secretary of the New Netherlands, Cor- 
nelius Van Tienhoven, writes in 1650 that 

The district inhabited by a nation called Raritangs is situated on a fresh 
water river that flows through the centre of a lowland which the Indians culti- 
vated. This vacant territory lies between two high mountains, far distant the 
one from the other. This is the handsomest and pleasantest country that man 
can behold. It furnished the Indians with abundance of maize, beans, pumpkins, 
and other fruits. * * * Through this valley pass large numbers of all sorts 
of tribes on their way north or east. This land is, therefore, not only adapted 
for raising grain and rearing all descriptions of cattle, but also very convenient 
for trade with the Indians. — Doc. History, N. Y. 

It is generally believed that the name, Bound Brook, is 
dei'ived from the fact that the boundaries of the present town are 
the brooks that empty into the Raritan ; this is a natural mis- 
take, the name having a much greater and more significant 
meaning. In the year 1666, after certain portions of the Eliza- 
bethtown patent had been set off to the Woodbridge, Piscataway 
and Newark settlers, it became necessary to define the limit of 
what was left of this grant ; consequently it was declared to 
extend from the mouth of the Raritan on the west to the mouth 
of the Passaic on the east, and from the Rahway river on the 
south to the brook emptying into the Raritan on the north, which 
was from thenceforth known as Bound brook. This is the 
stream that is crossed by the Central Railroad just below the 
station, and in after years it gave its name to the hamlet that 
grew upon its banks. Bound Brook has the honor of being 
Somerset's oldest settlement, the land on which the village stands 
having been purchased, in the year 1681, by Grovernor Philip 
Carteret, and others, from two Raritan Indians named KoN- 
ACKAMA and QuEROMAK. Doctor Messier considers this to be 
the first land purchased in this county. It was described as 
embracing territor}^ lying within the boundaries of the Raritan 
river on the south ; Bound brook, or Sacunk, (Indian for slow, 
sluggish stream), on the east; Middle brook, or Rha-weigh-weiros 
(Indian word meaning running from a deep hole), on the west ; 
and of a qprtain stony hill and Metapes' wigwam at the mouth of 



170 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Cedar brook on the north. The whole area being known as 
Baca-hova-wallahy, or "A round plain by the deep crooked 
water." 

Only two of these eight purchasers seem to have appeared in 
the county — Thomas Codrington and John Royce. The former 
had apportioned to him eight hundred and seventy-seven acres 
on the westerly side of the grant, fronting on Middle brook. 
Soon after 1683, he built upon it a large mansion, giving his 
homestead the name of liacawa.ckhana, an Indian word meaning 
a meadow or flat by a rapid brook. This is the same property 
now owned and occupied by Q-eorge La Monte. Codrington was 
a man of considerable influence ; before removing to Bound 
Brook he had been sheriff" of the city of New York, and after 
becoming a citizen of the province of New Jersey he was 
appointed a member of the governor's council, which position he 
seems to have been still holding in 1698. The name of John 
Royce is preserved in that of Roycefield, southwest of Somerville, 
where he owned twenty thousand acres of land. 

That portion of this Indian grant, which is the immediate site 
of Bound Brook, became the property of Thomas Rudyard, one 
of the original twenty-four propi'ietors of East New Jersey and 
its first deputy-governor. It Avas his daughter who, while the 
widow of Samuel Winder, became the wife of George Willocks. 
About the year 1700 George Cussart, Samuel Thompson and 
Jacob De Groot purchased Rudyard's land, together with eight 
hundred and seventy-seven acres adjoining, belonging to John 
Royce. George Cussart built his residence where now stands 
the village hotel ; and Thompson's house stood where the 
Central Railroad line crosses the highway, and was extant mitil 
the construction of the railway. 

The most important Raritan resident in social and political' 
consequence in the seventeenth century was Lord Neil Camp- 
bell. He lived in considerable state on a plantation of sixteen 
hundred and fifty acres situated near where the north and south 
branches of the Raritan join. He was a brother of the Duke 
of Argyle, and was connected with that nobleman's disastrous 
effort to aid the handsome " Pretender's" attempt to seize the 
crown of England. More fortunate than many of his co-conspir- 
ators. Lord Neil Campbell saved his head; and in* October, 



Bound Brook Presbyterian Church. 171 

1685, he reached East New Jersey, bearing the commission of 
its proprietors as deputy-governor. A retinue of sixty-five ser- 
vants, that had preceded him, awaited his arrival at his planta- 
tion. His two sons, John and Charles, were here before their 
father, they also being under the ban of the home government 
for political offenses. John, with his wife, three children and 
eleven servants it is thought lived on an estate of eighteen 
hundred and seventy acres that he owned on the west side of 
the south branch of the Earitan near Corle's mills. Archibald 
Campbell, a nephew of Lord Neil, and also a refugee, is said 
about this time to have lived in baronial style on Herbert's 
island, his residence being known as Kells' Hall. He had many 
house and field servants, and haiiging in the belfry of the Bound 
Brook academy is an old bell with which, it is said, he used to 
call his slaves from their labors. Within fifty years descend- 
ants of the Campbells were living in this village ; there are none 
now, though in the adjoining county they are said to be num- 
erous. 

The Scotch and English multiplied in this vicinity, and by the 
year 1700 they were in sufficient numbers to warrant forming 
the '^ Presbyterian Congregation of Bound Brook," which 
before long became one of the most flourishing and important 
religious organizations in the colony. We have no record of 
where the first services were held — probably in one of the log 
dwellings that were distributed along the willow -fringed banks 
of the river. It was not until 1725 that the congregation ei-ected 
its first edifice, a low one-storey house which stood within the 
present church grounds, and was preserved until far in this cen- 
tury, the uses of its later years being that of a school-house. Itin- 
erant preachers served the needs of the people until 1741, when 
the Reverend James McCrea was appointed by the Presbytery 
as a supply, which service he continued till 1749. A second 
and more pretentious building was completed about the year 
1760, the funds having been obtained from the proceeds of a 
public lottery. 

Affixed to the walls of the present church edifice is a tablet 
showing the first settled minister of the congregation to have 
been the Reverend Israel Read. ' He was called to the pastorate 
in 1750, " in which he was faithful to his Divine Master to the 



172 The Story of an Old Far^f. 

death." In November, 1793, he was thrown from his carriage 
while riding near New Brunswick, receiving injuries of which 
three days later he died. Judging from the congregational 
records it would seem that members of the Field family have, 
from the founding of this religious society, been among its most 
active supporters and benefactors. A portion of the church 
grounds was conveyed by Benjamin and Jeremiah Field in the 
year 1749, and the large church Bible which bears a London 
imprint of 1772, has on its leaf, in the hand writing of the Rev- 
erend Mr. Read, the following : " Mr. Michael Field's Book 
1784 he Presents to the Reverend Mr. Read being the Second 
Small Legacy made by him to the Church at Bound Brook. 
Pris-1-8-0." Michael Field died on the thirteenth of January, 
1792; a copy of his will, in my possession, shows that he 
bequeathed one thousand pounds to the trustees of the congrega- 
tion, the interest of which was to be applied "towards supporting 
the gospell in the Presbiterian Church at Bound Brook." He 
also left the sum of five hundred pounds for the support of a free 
school within the congregation. This was not the first one of the 
village. The Scotch Presbyterians held the school almost in equal 
estimation with the church ; schoolmasters were brought from the 
old country and early established in the East Jersey settle- 
ments. In 1752, when Johannes visited Bound Brook, John 
Wacker taught the village children in a low one-storey building 
within the present church grounds. Doubtless the colonial 
lads found that pedagogue's name to be appropriate to his call- 
ing, for schoolmasters of the olden time considered that mental 
perceptions were precipitated by knuckles and palms being well 
ridged by hard rulers. One of the first teachers in the 
free academy established by the bequest of Michael Field was 
Isaac Toucey, who afterwards was secretary of war under 
Buchanan's administration. 

When in 1752 our wayfarer rode down this ancient high- 
way — the Great Raritan Road — through Bound Brook, he found 
a village of about twenty houses, all of one storey, guarded 
at either end by a spiritual and material sentinel, for at the 
extreme south stood the church, while equally far north was 
William Harris's tavern. This "public" continued in the same 
family until 1815, when Isaac Harris combined the duties of 



Bound Rrook Residents in 1752. 173 

being its landlord with those of the sheriff of the county. A 
portion of the original structure continues to represent the hos- 
pitalities of this neighborhood in the present Middlebrook hotel. 
It has been said that it was not until near the end of the century 
that Peter Van Norden erected the first two-storey house, and 
painted it a bright green. So much was this architectural extra- 
vagance condemned by the villagers, that it became known as 
'' Van Norden's Folly." It was destroyed by fire in 1882, and 
until then was occupied by descendants in the fourth generation 
of its ambitious builder. Besides the tavern there is still another 
building standing in that vicinity, which was in existence at the 
time of Johannes' visit. It is the old Shepherd house on the 
heights back of the village, which was built before the year 
1730. 

Among the citizens of this ancient burgh in the year 1752, 
besides those already mentioned, was Peter Williamson, who 
lived in a house on the bank of the river, just south of where 
now is the railroad station, built in 1684 by John, son of Lord 
Neil Campbell ; John de Groot, whose hovise, built by his father 
in 1700, stood just north of the main street, — his son Jacob, 
who lived to be ninety-four years of age, died in this dwell- 
ing, which was preserved until the year 1839 when it was 
destroyed by fire ; John Anderson, the remains of whose house are 
still to be seen on the property of Isaac J. Fisher ; William 
Moore, a hatter ; John Castner, a shoemaker ; and Tobias Van 
Norden, who built a store in 1849, upon the site of the one now 
or lately owned by John D. Voorhees. It was a long building of 
but one storey, with two dormer windows in its sloping gambril 
roof. Van Norden continued as Bound Brook's storekeeper until 
after the Revolution, and we can imagine Johannes dismounting, 
either going or coming, in order to fill some little commissions 
from home, as at this time it was the nearest shop to the " Old 
Farm." A grandson of Van Norden says that for some twenty- 
five years previous to 1765 his grandfather was extensively 
engaged in baking ship bread, which he exported direct to the 
West Indies, carting it in wagons to New Brunswick where it 
was transferred to vessels. 

Speaking of a lottery as a means of raising money for complet- 
ing the Bound Brook church, brings to mind their prevalence in 



174 The Stoky of an Old Fakm. 

colonial times. It was the financial fashion of the age, and con- 
sidered quite as legitimate as is to-day the placing on the mar- 
ket of authorized railway securities. The following curious 
extract from the diary of the Reverend Samuel Seabury, father 
of Bishop Seabury, shows the peculiar views prevailing in the 
last century as to the propriety and morality of lotteries and 
gambling : 

The ticket No. 5,886, in the Light-house and Public Lottery of New York, 
drew in my favor, by the blessing of Almighty God, 500 pounds sterling, of which 
I received 425 pounds, there being a deduction of fifteen per cent ; for which I 
now record to my posterity my thanks to Almighty God, the giver of all good 
gifts. 

These enterprises were under the patronage of the best people 
in the land. Among the autographic treasures of John F. McCoy, 
of Brooklyn, is the following : 

1768. This Ticket (No. 176) shall entitle the Possessor to whatever Prize may 
happen to be drawn against its number in the Mountain Road Lottery. 

(Signed) Go. Washington. 

Judging from the advertisements appearing in the middle of 
the last century in the New York papers, there was hardly a 
settlement in the province that had not on foot some plan for a 
lottery. The beneficiaries of those extraordinary monetary 
schemes were most varied in character, and they were often for 
the aid of private as well as public enterprises. One set up in 
New Brunswick was for the relief of an insolvent debtor. Peter 
Bodine advertised another having one hundred and ninety-five 
prizes, " many of them being lots in the heart of that growing 
place, Raritan Landing, which is a market for the most plen- 
tiful wheat country of its bigness in America." It would seem 
that speciUative real estate bubbles were early afloat in the New 
Jersey air. The Landing must have stopped growing very sud- 
denly, and one woiUd need to search diligently now to find that 
number of lots in this then called market. Within a few years 
of that time the Presbyterian " meeting-houses" at Amwell and at 
Bound Brook, the English church at New Brunswick, St. John's 
church at Elizabethtown, and Trinity church at Newark, were 
all completed with the assistance aff'orded by lotteries. In Phila- 
delphia, in 1749, one was established to raise fifteen hundred 
pounds for the benefit of Nassau, now the College of New Jer- 



Lotteries in the Olden-Time. 175 

seyat Princeton ; and in May, 1754, a Pennsylvania newspaper 
advertised that tickets in a Connecticut lottery for the benetit of 
this same college, "will be had of Mr. Cowell, at Trenton." In 1 773 
that institution, in conjmiction with the Presbyterian church at 
Princeton, secured by the same means fifty-six hundred and 
twenty-six pounds. Toward the end of the century lotteries 
had grown in bad repute and were generally prohibited ; but 
immediately after the Revolution the legislature of New Jersey 
granted the borough of Elizabethtown the privilege of holding 
one " to raise a sum of money for building a court-house and 
jail, and finishing the academy, which during the late war was 
burned by the enemy." 

As Johannes left Bound Brook and rode southerly down the 
valley of the Raritan, the country quite lost that impress of soli- 
tude it had borne during the earlier stages of his journey. The 
heavy timber was now left behind, the trees grew more sparsely, 
for he had reached a region where settlers under the first prop- 
rietors earliest penetrated, and established their plantations. He 
was now in Middlesex county, and the township he traversed 
had for fifty years been occupied by the husbandman. Gener- 
ous orchards and abundant fields had long before taken the place 
of tangled maizes and impenetrable thickets, and much of the 
bottom and bench lands had been wrested by the hand of culti- 
vation from the grasp of primeval nature. No longer were the 
rude structures of logs that had "housed the families of pioneers 
the sole architectural features of the landscape; in many instances 
they had made way for the more pretentious farm-house, the 
homes of permanent, well-established residents ; and ample 
banis bore testimony to the fertility and productiveness of the 
surrounding acres. The board houses were of one storey, with 
long sloping roofs extending over a porch in front and descend- 
ing nearly to the ground in the rear. Here the overhanging 
eaves sheltered the big Dutch oven, and a broad space where rus- 
set-gowned maids sang at their spinning wheels, and where busy 
house-wives did the family weaving at their clumsy looms. 
These frame houses were generally unpainted and rapidly grew 
venerably dark in color. Their interiors were divided into but 
few rooms ; one or two sufficed for the needs of the family, wliile 
the others harbored pumpkins, carrots and potatoes, with dried 



176 The Story of an Old Farm. 

apples and peaches hanging in festoons from the ceiling. The 
humble log hut, which had originally done residential duty, stood 
like a poor relation at a respectful distance, often degraded to 
the menial service of sheltering pigs and kine. Sometimes it 
was converted into a rude brew-house, for the Raritan settlers 
manufactured and drank great quantities of malt liquors. 

Mention has been made before of the fact that Hollanders 
from Long Island had early learned of the fertility and desirabil- 
ity of land in the rich valley of the Raritan. By the year 
1703, they were thoroughly established on both sides of the 
river. Judging from a report made by Governor Dongan, of 
New York, to the English Board of Trade in 1687, it would 
seem that even by that time the Dutch had emigrated from 
Long Island to New Jersey. English emigrants, in 1685, had 
divided into about six hundred-acre tracts nearly all the land 
between New Brimswick and Bound Brook, extending for two 
miles back from the south bank of the river ; by the year 1717 
the greater part of these lands was out of the hands of their original 
owaiers and occupied by the Dutch. Interspersed among the 
Hollanders that located on the north, or east, bank of the 
river, were many permanent English and Scotch settlers, as the 
names of Field, Boice, Smith, Ross, Low and others bear 
witness. 

Primogeniture being now unknown in this country, instances 
are not frequent where land descends from father to son 
for successive generations. In addition to the usual necessity 
of dividing estates, too often the heir to homestead lands 
is quite wanting in that love and reverence for ancestral 
acres that distinguishes people of an older country. It is 
pleasant to be able to record and make honorable mention 
of so rare a preservation of a family property as that of Benja- 
min M., Benjamin B., John K., and John B. Field, Avho now 
own and occupy five hundred acres of land fronting on the river, 
a short distance below^ Bound Brook. Theii's is one of the few 
instances in New Jersey of persons being able, in walking 
over their lands, to feel the proud consciousness of overlooking 
a broad territory that has been theirs and their ancestors for 
nearly two himdred years. The New Jersey forefather was 
John Field, who, on the fourteenth of December, 1695, pur- 



John Field's Raritan Purchase in 1695. 177 

chased ten hundred and fifty-five acres of land, fronting the 
Raritan for two miles and a half, extending about three quarters 
of a mile inland and commencing about one mile below Boimd 
Brook. He came from Long Island, where he was bom in 
1659, being the grandson of Robert Field, born in 1610, who it 
is supposed came to Rhode Island with Roger Williams. Rob- 
ert with fifteen associates obtained in 1645 from Governor 
William Kieft, of New Netherland, a patent for a large area of 
land on Long Island, embodying the present location of Flush- 
ing. The New Jersey ancestor was fifth in descent — in the 
direct line — from the famous astronomer, John Field, born A. D. 
1525, who introduced the Copernican system in England. While 
living in London in 1556 he published the first English astro- 
nomical tables on the basis of the new discoveries. In recogni- 
tion of this service he received from the Crown a patent author- 
izing him to bear a crest on his family arms. His son Richard 
became chaplain to Queen Elizabeth, and was the author of sev- 
eral religious works. The Fields trace their descent from 
Hubertus de la Feld, who held lands in the county of Lancaster, 
England, in the third year of the reign of William the Con- 
queror. The name, in the old English, was written, " Feld ;" 
and is merely the past participle of the verb to fell. Field-land 
is opposed to wood-land, and means land where the trees have 
been felled. When such land is spoken of by such old authors 
as Gower, Chaucer and others, it is always written '^ feld:" " In 
Woode, in Feld or Cittee, Shall no man steale in nowise." 

John Field purchased his Raritan lands in 1695 from Benja- 
min Clarke, who inherited the property from his father — also 
named Benjamin. The senior Clarke, who died in 1689, arrived 
in Perth Amboy in 1683, securing headlands for himself, his 
son, and eight others. He is said to have built a house near the 
jimction of Market and Water streets, where he established New 
Jersey's first stationery and book store. In a letter to Scotland 
in March, 1685, Charles Gordon writes : " Neither are we 
altogether destitute of Books and Clergy, for George Keith, who 
arrived three weeks since, with others — (they were all winter in 
Barbadoes) — have brought mathematics, and Benjamin Clarke a 
Library of Boohs to sell ; so you may see New Perth begins to be 
founded upon Clergy." Clarke was a Quaker, and we may judge 
12 



178 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

him a stiff-necked one after reading the following extract from 
the old book of records of the Society of Friends : 

At the monthly meeting lield in Amboy the thirteenth of the fifth month, 
1687, the friends appoynted to speak to Benjamin Clerk brought his answer, which 
was, that he would not come to meeting because Governor Lawry called him a 
divil (as he saves) wherewith friends not being satisfied desires George Keith and 
John Barclay to speak to him again. 

Many of these ancestral acres have been the homestead lands 
of Fields from that day to this. At the time Johannes rode 
through this domain the original estate was owned and occupied 
by the grandsons of John Field — as follows : Jeremiah, bom 
in 1713, who lived on the farm lately owned by Stephen Voor- 
hees, and whose stone dwelling is still extant ; John, born in 
1714, who lived on what was lately known as the Oliver farm, 
in a stone house still standing which has inscribed on the west 
wall the date 1743 and the initials J. F. ; Michael, born in 
1723, who lived on the mill property lately owned by Louis 
Clark; Benjamin, born in 1735, who lived on the farm now 
owned by Benjamin M. Field, in a frame house still standing, 
the newer portion of which is inscribed with the date 1761 and 
the initials B. F. ; and Richard, born 1726, who lived on the 
farm lately owned by John D. Field. His house is stiU standing, 
its corner-stone being marked with the date 1710 and the 
initial F. ; it is thought, however, that this stone was taken from 
the original house of the first purchaser, John Field, which 
stood a few hundred yards away, its foundations and cellars 
being still plainly visible. 

You may ^wonder at so prolonged a narrative of the Fields 
and their property. It should have an interest to the descend- 
ants of Johannes from the fact that the tAVO families are in this 
wise connected : Jeremiah Field, born in 1753, married Jane^ 
daughter of Captain Jacob Ten Eyck of Revolutionary fame. 
He settled in Bedminster township, purchasing on the sixth of 
February, 1790, from Daniel Heath a farm of one hundred and 
three acres, fronting on the Lamington river. Here Richard J. 
Field was born in 1785, who on the twenty-second of Decem- 
ber, 1808, married Mary Kline, born on the seventeenth of 
April, 1791, she being the granddaughter of Jacob Kline, and his 



Raritan Landing's Industries in 1752. 179 

wife Veronica Gerdrutta, the eldest daughter of Johannes 
Moelich. 

On reaching Raritan Landing, two miles above New Bruns- 
wick, Johannes found it, for those days, a place of considerable 
prominence ; its marked growth of a few previous years having 
given rise to expectations of ultimate commercial greatness that 
the future was not to realize. Its prosperity was gained mainly 
from the fertile valley bordering the Raritan, and the rich fields 
of wheat and corn that were rapidly multiplying betAveen that 
river and the Delaware. This, together with the fact that the 
Landing was on tide-water and at the head of sloop navigation, 
gave it an importance second only to that of New Brunswick, 
and by many it was thought to be a serious business rival to that 
city. In addition to its shipping interests this point had active 
manufactiu'ing industries. The Raritan was here dammed, and 
mills were in successfid operation, both for grinding the grain of 
the back country and for manufacturing flour and meal for 
shipment to New York and more eastern ports. Among the 
manuscript papers of the late Ralph Voorhees is the Frank- 
lin township tax list for the year 1735. This old paper testifies 
directly as to the early prosperity of this portion of Somerset, by 
showing that at that date there were already established in the 
township six grist mills : one at the Landing, owned by Coert 
Van Voorhees ; another, a mile up the river, on the Rapelye 
brook ; the third, owned and operated by John Folkers, on the 
brook emptying into the Raritan, east of the house now or lately 
occupied by Abrain Sebring ; there was also the Wyckoff mill at 
Six Mile Run ; the Moere mill at JRocky Hill ; and another on 
the Millstone river, owned by Benjamin Griggs who is supposed 
to have been the founder of Griggstown. This last mill in the 
year 1752 was owned and operated by Nicholas Veghten. At 
this time there was also a mill, which had been erected in 1747 
by Hendrick Schenck, located on the west side of the Millstone 
river, since known as Blackwells ; and in 1749 Abram Berean 
erected on the same river the Weston mill, lately known as 
Robeson's. 

Much testimony could be produced going to show the popu- 
lousness and growth of this part of New Jersey at that time as 
compared with other portions of the province. A correspondent of 



180 The Stoky of an Old Farm. 

ex-Governor Robert Hunter, in a letter to him in England, 
about the year 1730, writes that '' New Brunswick had grown 
very rapidly for the reason that the country back of this town 
had improved quite fast. The farmers principally raised wheat, 
and the large mills in the vicinity rendered this an important 
flouring mart." Ralph Voorhees, in one of his sketches of the 
early settlers, tells us that the water-power at the Landing was 
destroyed about the time of the Revolution by the people along 
the upper Raritan, who were exasperated because it prevented 
shad from ascending the stream. 

When Johannes reached the Landing he was much inter- 
ested in viewing what was then considered, and properly so, 
a very grand mansion. It was surpassed by few, if any, resi- 
dences in the province. Nearly fifty feet square, it elevated a 
dormer-windowed hipped roof above two stone storeys, pre- 
senting a strong contrast to the ordinary wooden buildings of the 
surrounding country. Embowered in a luxuriant growth of ivy, 
it is still to be seen on the hillside opposite the road leading to 
the covered bridge, being owned and occupied by George W. 
Metlar. This important dwelling was built by Cornelius Low, 
Jr., who was born on the thirty-first of March, 1700, 
and settled in East Jersey about 1730, through the influ- 
ence of the Gouvemeur family, he having married Johanna 
Gouverneur in 1729. He was a surveyor, and did much 
valuable work in the province in defining the bomidaries 
of important estates. Schuyler's " Colonial New York " con- 
tains the record from Low's family Bible, which recites that 
he built his new house at '^ Raritan Landing, on the mountain," 
in 1741. The record repeatedly mentions the burial of members 
of his family in Jacob De Groot's vault. This tomb was prob- 
ably in the Presbyterian churchyard at Bound Brook, as this 
was the same De Groot who in the year 1700, in company with 
Cussart and Thompson, purcliased the site of that village from 
Deputy- Governor Rudyard. Cornelius Low, Jr., does not 
appear to have been of the Presbyterian persuasion, as we find 
on the minutes of the Dutch Reformed church, " op de 3IiU- 
stonc" his name entered as a communicant. This congregation 
was organized in 1727, by the Reverend Henricus Coens of 
Acquackanonk (Passaic). In this year, 1752, a new edifice had 



The Church Op De Millstone. 181 

been erected on the site of the present Harlingen church. It 
was an antiquated Dutch structure, having lofty gables and a 
long steep roof. The interior was divided by one aisle, faced 
with short pews in which sat the men, while the body of the 
church was occupied by square pews filled with chairs for the 
use of the women and children. I do not find that the name of 
Low has been perpetuated in either Somerset or Middlesex. A 
descendant married the late Charles King, president of Colmnbia 
college, New York, and died in Paris a few years since ; her 
only son, C. L. King, lives in Bellows Falls, Vermont, and 
a daughter is the wife of Mr. Waddington, the present French 
minister at the English court. 

Johannes crossed the river on the rifile below the dam, and 
making his way down the opposite shore he was soon in New 
Brunswick, where he dismounted in front of a tavern on Water 
street, the city's main thoroughfare. After his long ride we can 
imagine him quite ready for what some one has called the hope 
of the hungry, the rest of the weary, the consolation of the mis- 
erable — dinner. 




CHAPTER XIV. 

From an Indian Path to the King's Highway — Neiv Brunswick 
and Historic Piscataway. 

The antiquated college town of New Brunswick, which the 
traveller Philadelphia-ward finds perched on the high rolling 
banks of the Raritan, is located on the most ancient highway in 
New Jersey ; a road that, before the foot of the first white man 
had trod the American continent, was centui'ies older than were 
its flanking oaks, chestnuts and hickories. 

In those remote days — before the advent of Europeans 
— a faint path coidd be traced on nature's carpet of fallen 
leaves and twigs, running east and west through the thick- 
ets and imdergrowth of the vast and sombre forest. It 
was the soft impress of the moccasined feet of the Lenni- 
Lenape, made while on their frequent way to the Lenni- 
Wihittuck, or Delaware river. This Indian path started at what 
is now Elizabcthport and plunging into the solitudes of the 
wilderness extended almost in a direct line to a point on the 
Raritan opposite where Albany street, in New Brunswick, now 
terminates. Here the red-men at low water forded the river, or 
at higher tides paddled across in their birch canoes. Passing up 
the present line of Albany street, the foot-path traversed the 
hoary woods with but little deviation till it reached the Dela- 
ware, just above where now is the capital of the state. This was 
the Indian's thoroughfare — their main artery of travel. It was 
intersected by others, the most important being the one by which 
the Monseys and more noi'thern tribes found their way to the 
sea. Commencing on the Delaware in what is now Sussex 
coimty, near where three states converge, this trail, known as 
the Minisink path, ran southeasterly to within five miles of 
where Carteret foimded his capital, Elizabethtown. Turning to 



Indian Paths Across New Jersey. 183 

the rig;ht, it stretched across the country to the Raritan, three miles 
above its mouth. Following the south bank of the river and 
the shore of the Lower bay, the footpath continued along where 
now is the village of Middletown, and so onward over the pleas- 
ant rises and gentle declivities of Monmouth, till it penetrated 
the hemlock heights of the Highlands, and descending on their 
ocean side reached the river which the red-man had named 
Nauvessing,* " the place of good fishing." Another Indian 
trail branched from the first one at the Raritan ford, and follow- 
ing the river bank extended north and west, by way of the site 
of Bound Brook, to the forks of the stream, where it divided. It 
was over this trail that settlers first made their way up into 
Bedminster. 

Early in the seventeenth century other than Indian forms were 
to be seen passing along our ancient highway. Over this path, 
which had never been pressed by human feet save by those of 
the soft-stepping, stealthy savage, strode burly Dutchmen wear- 
ing hats of generous brim, broad belts and stout leather jerkins ; 
the smoke from their pipes, fragrant with the odors of the best 
Virginia, mingling with the breath of the woods and exuberant 
herbage. The Hollanders had settled New Amsterdam ; sailing 
in their high-pooped shallops through the Kill von Koll — the 
creek of^ the bay — they landed on the west shores of the Adder 
Koll — the back bay — and found this Indian trail a most conveni- 
ent route to their settlement on the Delaware. Later on, when 
the English had captured New Amsterdam, they, too, discovered 
that the natives had marked out an excellent line for a road 
across the Jerseys — and a road it has been from that day to this. 

A mutual good will soon existed between the Dutch and Eng- 
lish and the dusky occvipants of the little wigwam villages that 
were planted in cool and shady glens or by the side of sparkling 

* When the Dutch first landed on the shores of this part of Monmouth, they 
wrote down the Indian name for the place as it sounded to them, thus " Nan-ves- 
sing." The English converted the word into Nave-sink, from which NeversinL 
is, perhaps, a natural result. The generally-accepted significance of the name — 
" the place of good fishing" — is not endorsed by all authorities. By some the 
original word is interpreted as meaning, " high lands between the waters," while 
others claim its significance to be "pleasant fields," referring to all the country 
lying between the Highlands and Chingarora, as the vicinity of Keyport was 
called. 



184 The Story of an Old Farm. 

rills. The white man had not long used this forest trail before 
signs of human thrift began to break in upon the wildness of 
nature. He travelled not only with matchlock and hanger^ 
but with mattock and axe as well. The wild grape-vines and 
stunted bushes that encumbered the path were cleared away ; 
the decaying tree-trunks, giants that had fallen from mere 
weight of years, no longer impeded the passer-by. Foot-logs 
crossed the little streams, and soon the glittering axe hewed out 
a clearing here and there on the side of the path, from which 
rose little log cabins, premonitory symptoms and prophecies of 
populous hamlets and villages soon to follow. In 1665, when 
Philip Carteret reached the place he called Elizabethtown, it was 
ah'eady a settlement of four log huts. Some of the immigrants 
who had accompanied him from England made their way along this 
trail, till reaching a convenient point their brawny arms forced 
back the forest on either side, and planted the germ of a town 
which later migrators from New England named Woodbridge. 
In the following year other pioneers, striding sturdily westward, 
felled the trees and let the warm sunlight in on a new settlement, 
soon baptized as Piscataway. 

A few years later New Brunswick received its first inhabitant. 
Tradition gives his name as Daniel Cooper. Early in 1681 John 
Inians and some associate purchased ten thousand acres of land at 
Ahandcrhamock, as this vicinity had been named by the Indians. 
In November of the same year Inians located for himself on the 
west bank of the river twelve hundred acres, embracing the pres- 
ent site of New BrunsAvick. By 1684 a number of Holland people 
had settled on his land, among whom were the ancestors of such 
old Jersej' families as the Vrooms, Andersons, Probascos, Van 
Duyns and others. A charter for a ferry was granted in 1697 
to John Inians for the term of his or his wife's life, at the 
yearly rental of five shillings. Soon quite a settlement grew up 
about Inian's ferry, and travellers by the old Indian path began 
to be frequent. It lost its early appellation and became known 
as the Dutch trail ; indeed, for many years later it was little bet- 
ter than a trail through the woods, and was used only by pedes- 
trians and horsemen. In 1716, nearly twenty years after the 
establishment of the ferry, the tariff named only ^' horse and 
man " and " single person." Within a few years this old Dutch 



New Brunswick in 1717. 185 

trail began to present some of the characteristics of a road, and 
we find imposed upon the innkeepers of Elizabethtown, Wood- 
bridge and Piscataway a total annual tax of ten pounds for 
keeping the highway free from fallen timber. This impost, 
was laid for the preservation of the " lower road/' which, 
following a branch Indian path, diverged from the main trail a 
few miles beyond the Earitan, its trend being southwesterly, by 
way of Cranbmy, to Burlington. The necessity for this tax, as 
the act declares, was because of the unsettled condition of the 
country the road traversed, whereby it was in danger of falling 
into "decay to the great inconvenience of travelers who may pass 
and repass that way unless care be taken to maintain the same 
until such time as it may be maintained by those who inherit it." 

The town grew apace, and before 1717 there were people 
enough to necessitate the building of a church. A frame struc- 
ture fifty feet front, containing fifty pews, was erected under the 
superintendence of Elder Roelef Sebring and Deacons Hendrik 
Bries and Roelef Lucas. It faced the river on the corner of 
what is now Bui'net and Schureman streets, and for more than 
fifty years housed the congregation of the First Dutch Reformed 
church of the town. This was not the earliest house of worship 
in this vicinity. One had been erected some years before, about 
one and one-half miles beyond the present New Brmiswick city 
limits, and it is believed it was the first sanctuary built in the 
county of Somerset. Tradition characterizes it as a rude struc- 
ture, never entirely completed ; the settlement about Inian's 
ferry growing rapidly, the congregation preferred to transfer 
itself to a new church in " the town by the river " rather than 
complete the old one at a point where evidently population would 
not centre. 

From this time the tide of settlers rose, and rolled steadily on 
toward and beyond the Raritan. In 1730 the population of New 
Brunswick was augmented by the arrival of a number of Dutch 
families from the upper Hudson, who planted themselves on 
either side of the road leading up from the ferry, giving it the 
name of Albany street. Before then it had been known as 
French street, deriving its appellation from Philip French, the 
person from whom these new-comers had acquired their lands. 
He was a large owner in Middlesex county, and was the son of 



186 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Philip French who had been mayor of the city of New York and 
speaker of the assembly of that province. In addition to their 
native thrift the migrators introduced into East Jersey the good 
old Holland names of Van Dyke, Van Alen, Van Veghten, 
Van Deursen, Schuyler, Ten Broek, and others. Not only the 
town by the river benefited by this influx of new-comers ; the 
back country of Middlesex, which had been a county since 1682, 
lost its aspect of a solitude. The old Dutch trail was rapidly 
being ti'ansformed into the King's highway ; clearings multiplied, 
and what had been clearings were now converted into arable 
fields and well-tilled farms. Immigrants from Germany landing 
in New York traversed this road, seeking that Mecca of all pil- 
grims from the Rhine, the province of Pennsylvania. Finding 
their route bordered by goodly lands, many of them abandoned 
their proposed goal, and turning aside made their homes among 
the Dutch and English settlers. 

The country in the vicinity of this highway, when much of 
New Jersey was still a wilderness, had the appearance of being 
comparatively well cultivated and long occupied. James Alex- 
ander, the father of Lord Stirling, in a letter written in 1730, 
says that "■ In the year 1715 there were but four or five houses 
between Inian's ferry and the Delaware river, but that now — 
1730 — the country is settled very thick; as they go chiefly on 
raising of wheat and the making of flour, and as New Brunswick 
is the nearest landing, it necessarily makes that the storehouse 
for all the produce that they send to market ; which has drawn a 
considerable number of people to settle there, insomuch that 
a lot of ground in New Brunswick is grown to be near so great a 
price as so much ground in the heart of New York." 

Prof. Kalni. the Swedish botanist and traveller, when journey- 
ing in 1748 from Philadelphia to New York, expressed, the 
greatest surprise at finding so cultivated a region, and declared 
that in all his travels in America he saw no part of the open 
country so well peopled. At Trentown, which he reached by 
sloop, his landlord told him that twenty-two years before, when 
he first settled there, there were hardly any houses, but the 
increase since that time had been so great that there were now 
nearly one hundred. Along the road to the Raritan there were 
great distances of forests, but yet on much of the way he found 



New Brunswick Chartered in 1730. 187 

extensive fields of grain, and almost every farm had abimdant 
orchards. He especially noticed the great Jersey barns, which 
in many instances he thought to be as big as small churches, so 
large, in fact, that, which to the foreigner seemed most extraor- 
dinary, they housed horses, cattle, grain, mows, and thresh- 
ing floors. Their great double doors enabled farmers to drive 
loaded teams '^ in one side and out the other." The Pro- 
fessor attributed this generous farm architecture to the Germans 
and Dutch, whom he reports as occupying most of the country. 
On the thirtieth day of December, 1730, two weeks before 
New York was incorporated as a city. King George II. bestowed 
on New Brunswick, under the great seal of the Crown, its first 
city charter.* The inhabitants agreed in consideration of the 
privileges granted by this precious document to pay annually to 
the kingdom of Great Britain one sheaf of wheat. The opening- 
language of this charter was as follows : 

Whereas, our Loving Subjects Thomas ffarmar, Jacob Okey, James Hude 
Dolin Hagerman, Lawrence Williamson, Duncan Hutchinson, Derrick Schuyler, 
William Okey, Paul Miller, William Williamson, Abraham Bennett, Cort Voor- 
hees, James Nelsofi, John Balding, and many Others have petitioned for a city 
charter, it has been granted. Also for the reason that the said Towne of New 
Brunswick, standing near the head of a fine Navigable River, and being the 
Most Convenient place for shipping oft' the produce of a large and plentifull 
Country Lying on the back thereof is a place of very Considerable trade & 
Commerce. 

The citizens of New Jersey in the olden-time had great confi- 
dence in the future prosperity of the province. In laying out 
their towns and cities they established corporate limits great 
enough for that extensive population, the coming of which they 
so surely anticipated. Thus Perth Amboy — already for twelve 
years a chartered city — included a thousand acres east of the 
Raritan, while on the opposite side of the river its northerly line 
extended from the mouth of South river westerly nearly to 
Hightstown, and its southerly parallel line ran fully as far into 
Monmouth county from the mouth of Cheesequake creek. New 
Brunswick, equally ambitious, extended its southerly boundary 

*New York City was first chartered by Governor Dongan in 1676, but its 
fathers, fearing that this governor's corporation might not, under pressure, stand 
a legal test, asked of the King, and received on the fifteenth of January, 1730- 
1731, the royal charter by which the city was governed for a century. 



188 The Story of ax Old Farm. 

to the Amboy line, while its northerly limits stretched west- 
erly almost to Princeton. And so the two great cities of Middle- 
sex adjoined each other. The following is a list of New 
Brunswick's officers for the first year : 

Mayor, Thomas Farmar; Recorder, James Hude ; Aldermen, Wm. Cox, 
Jacob Oakey, Dally Hagaman, William Cheasman. Josiah Davison and Lawrence 
Williamson, Esqrs. ; Sherifi'and Water-baliftj Evan Drummond ; Common Coun- 
cilmen or Assistants, John Thomson, Cort Voorhees, Minne Voorhees, Henry 
Longfield, AVilliam AVilliamson and John Van Dyck ; Chamberlain or Treasurer, 
Alexander Moore ; Coroner, Thomas Marshall ; Marshall or Serjeant at Mace, 
John Dally ; Overseers of the Poor, John Van Nuys and Daniel Fitch ; Con- 
stables, John Stevens, David Lee and Michael Moore. 

It would be pleasant to know what manner of men we're all 
of these political pioneers — New Brunswick's first city-fathers. 
Of some of them a measure of information as to their personality 
gleams upon us through the mists of time. Professor Austin 
Scott, of Rutger's college, in a paper entitled, " Beginnings of City 
Life in New Jersey," read before the '^ New Brunswick Historical 
Club " on the twenty-ninth of October, 1886, paid a high tribute 
to the character and attainments of Thomas Farmar, the city's first 
mayor. He is said to have lived on Staten Island and at Perth 
Amboy before removing to New Brunswick : as early as 1709 
John Harrison, who was with the provincial army on the north- 
em frontier, addressed a letter to him at Amboy. In October, 
1711, he was appointed second judge of the provincial supreme 
coiu't, and was its presiding judge from March, 1728, to Novem- 
ber, 1729. He ably represented his county in the assembly 
during the Morris administration, being a stanch supporter of 
that governor in his spirited tight against the aggressive tyranny 
of Lord Cornbury. Mr. Farmar had several children : one of 
of them — Christoplier — assumed the name of Billop, inheriting 
with it from his wife's family a large estate on Staten Island, to 
which he removed. His residence — still standing — is a promi- 
nent land-mark at Billops'-point, at the extreme southerly end of 
the Island. This antiquated dwelling is well worthy of a visit, 
not only because of its quaint appearance and old-time charac- 
teristics, but from its having been the place where Franklin, 
Adams and Rutledge, conferred with Lord Howe in 1770 in the 
futile endeavor to establish some basis for an honorable peace. 
Two of the mayor's daughters married Peter Goelet,and his young- 



New Brunswick's First City-Fathers. 189 

est and most beautiful daughter, Sarah, became the wife of Doc- 
tor Alexander Ross, of New Brunswick, who was bom in Ireland 
in 1723, and died in 1775, as his monument in Christ's chui'ch- 
yard attests. He it was who in the middle of the last century 
erected on the river bank, opposite and above the city, that sub- 
stantial residence which is still known as Ross Hall — a most 
interesting specimen of colonial architecture. At the death of 
Doctor Ross, his student. Doctor Charles A. Howard, succeeded 
not only to his preceptor's practice but to his wife and house 
as well. 

Recorder Hude was a Scotch Presbyterian and a prominent 
merchant of New Brunswick. His father, Adam Hude, came to 
America with John Johnstone on the ill-fated fever ship "Henry 
and Francis." He settled in Woodbridge township, building a 
house which was recently standing on the Rahway road one 
mile north of the village. His son, the recorder, the Honorable 
Colonel James Hude as he was termed, during a long and use- 
ful life, occupied almost every important office within the gift of 
the government and people. At his death in 1762 he was 
a member of the king's council and mayor of the corporation of 
New Brunswick. The "New York Mercury" of the eighth of 
November of that year, in noticing his death, " after a long and 
tedious indisposition," mentions him as " a gentleman who, for 
his great probity, justice, affability, moral and political virtues, 
was miiversally esteemed and beloved by those who knew him." 

Derrick, or Dirck, Schuyler, one of the petitioners for the 
charter, was a Dutch migrator from the upper Hudson. He was 
bom on the twenty-fifth of July, 1700, being the son of Abra- 
ham, and the grandson of David, the first notice of the latter being 
obtained from his marriage on the thirteenth of October, 1657, 
to Catalyna, daughter of Abraham Isaacse Verplanck. He is 
believed to have been a younger brother of the Philip Peterse 
who is known in Schuyler annals as " the immigrant." There 
was also living in New Brunswick at this time Abraham Schuy- 
ler, a four years younger brother of Derrick, whose wife was 
Katrina, daughter of Barent Staats. 

Abraham Bennet, another of the petitioners, lived near the 
old Dutch chui-ch at Three Mile Run. He was the son of Adrian 
and Angenietje Bennet and the grandson of William Bennet 



190 The Story of an Old Farm. 

who emigrated from Holland to Gowanus on Long Island early 
in the seventeenth centmy. He, Aldermen Lawrence William- 
son (Laurens WUliamse), Dolis, or Dallius, Hagaraan and Con- 
stable Michael Moore were in Middlesex county at the dawn of 
the eighteenth century ; their names are to be found on a sub- 
scription list, dated 1703, by which £10,16s.,6d. was obtained from 
thirty subscribers to aid in procuring a minister from Holland. 
Bennet, his parents and wife Jannetie ; Aldermen Williamson, 
Hagaman and Jacob Oakey (Jacobus Oukee) ; and Comicilman 
Minne Voorhees ; were all members in 1717 of the Dutch 
Reformed church of New Brunswick, as the minutes of the con- 
gregation for that year show. Minne Voorhees was a sort of a 
lay-domine, an opsinderin, or helper of the minister. He cate- 
chised the children and in the absence of the pastor conducted 
the church services, which he did exceptionally well, being 
blessed with an extraordinary memory that enabled him to 
repeat a lecture and all the exercises without the aid of notes. 
He was the son of Lucas Stephens, and grandson of Stephen 
Coiu'ten who settled at Flatlands, Long Island, in 1660, having 
reached America in April of that year from the province of 
Drenthe, Holland, in the ship Bontehoe (Spotted Cow.) The 
name Voorhees is derived from the Holland village of Hesse, 
where the family originated ; and with the prefix Van means 
" from before Hesse." Minne Voorhees owned a mill and a 
large tract of land on Lawrence's brook just south of the city, 
and in 1723 is said to have been living on what is now, or was 
recently, known as the '^ college farm." Councilman Cort 
Voorhees, a descendant of the same immigrant-ancestor, was also 
a grinder of grists ; his mill stood at the mouth of the Mile Run 
at the Landing, about opposite the residence of the late 
Lewis Carman. As is shown by the Franklin tax list of 1735 
he owned one hundred and sixty acres of land and nine head of 
cattle, on which he paid a tax of £l,7s.,ld. Another Long Island 
migrator among the city fathers was Alderman Hagaman. He 
was the son of Denyse and Liurstia Hagaman, of Flatbush, and 
grandson of Adrian who emigrated from Holland in 1651. Law- 
rence Williamson, like many modern aldermen, seems to have been 
a publican of substance. Professor Scott has an original deed 
by which in 1742 Williamson conveyed to the city as a gift a lot 



How THE Dutch Obtained Patronymics. 191 

" near his old pot-house" on Burnet and Peace streets — now 
Commerce square. Like most of the Raritan Dutch, he came 
from Long Island ; he returned there in 1711, in search of a 
wife, being married at Flatlands on the twenty-ninth of March 
of that year to Sarah Stoothoff. 

Jacob Oakey, in his cognomen, is an excellent exam.ple of that 
peculiar fashion among the New Netherland Dutch of evolving 
a patronymic from a Christian name. Tracing genealogies from 
Holland descents is vexatious, because so few of the emigrant 
families possessed surnames ; in very many instances the 
Christian name of the father served as a surname for children. 
Thus Peter's son Michael would be called Michael Fieterserif 
Fieterse, or Fictcrs, and should Michael have a son Jacob, he in 
his turn would be Jacob 3Iichaelsen, Michaelse, or Michaels, 
It was not until the English immigration had become gen- 
eral that the Dutch felt the necessity of adopting surnames. 
These were variously chosen — from the Christian name of the 
father, from their occupations, their homes in the old country, or 
often some peculiar feature of the locality from which they had 
emigrated. Accordingly, in this manner were developed such 
namesas Hendricks, Hendrickson, Anderson, Williams, Williamson, 
and Johnson. The Van Winkles derived their names from ivinkel, 
" a shop," the Van Horns from Hoorn, a port on the Zuyder 
Zee I the Van Ripens and Van Ripers from RijJen, a. diocese in 
North Jutland ; the Rosendales from Roscndaalen ('' valley of 
roses "), a town on the Belgian frontier ; Van Dyck means 
" from the dike " ; Van Zant, " from the sand " (coast) : Van 
Boskerck, "from the church in the woods," and so on, ad 
infinitum. 

Jacobus Ouke, as he spelled his name, was the son of Jacohus 
Auchersz, of Flatlands, and the grandson of Auke Janse, a Long 
Island carpenter who emigrated from Amsterdam in 1651. The 
records of New Amsterdam show that on the tenth of March, 
1653, a suit was instituted before the burgomasters and schepens 
by Hendrick Egbertsen, to recover from Heudrick Gerritsen 
thirty-five guilders and sixteen stivers for building a house. 
The contestants were referred to carpenters Auke Janse and 
Christian Barentsen as arbitrators. Alderman Oakey's carpenter- 
ancestor waxed so important in the new country as to feel the 



192 The Story of an Old Farm. 

need of a surname, so he assumed the name of Van Nuys, which 
is the surname of most of his descendants. The posterity of our 
alderman, however, all became Oakeys ; thus we find two dis- 
tinct families of different names emanating from a common ances- 
tor. This is not uncommon in Dutch genealogies ; the Lane 
and Van Pelt families, of Somerset and Hudson counties, origina- 
ted in 3Iatthys Janss Van Pelt Lanen, a Walloon, who emigrated 
from Liege in 1663, and settled at New Utrecht. So with the 
New Jersey families of Garretson and Van Waggenen ; their 
ancestor was Gerritt Gerritsen, who reached New Amsterdam 
in 1660 from Wageningen, a Rhenish town in Gelderland ; some 
of the second generation assumed his name as a surname (now 
Garretson and Garrison) others took the name of Van Waggenen. 
The two old New York families of Rutger and Van Wart derive 
their names from two brothers, Rutger and Teunis, sons of Jacobus 
Van Schoenderwoert who came to Beaverwyck in about the year 
1640. The descendants of the former, on removing to New York, 
assumed the name of Rutgers, while those of the latter abbrevi- 
ated their ancestor's surname, and have since been known as 
Van Wart. Many instances of divided ancestral streams are to 
be found among New Jersey's families of Dutch and Scandinav- 
ian extraction. 

It is quite time that we return to Johannes ; we may reasona- 
ably suppose that he has finished his dinner, and before again 
taking to the saddle is looking about New Brunswick, which he 
is visiting for the first time. He finds it rather an attractive 
little town, lying mostly under the hill, on the river bank. At 
that time it had but two prominent streets, and the houses were 
generally constructed of plank, though the Dutch of Albany 
street occupied two-storey brick dwellings, they having brouglit 
bricks and building materials with them when they migrated. 
These latter houses presented their peaked gables to the street, 
and were approached through little wooden-seated porches 
on which the stout burghers and their families would gather in the 
cool of the summer evenings. Kalm writes that the Dutch of 
the city were an exclusive set, keeping much within themselves 
and quite looking down on their poorer neighbors. We can 
accept this statement cum grano salis, as in more than one place 
in his book of travels we find the Swede especially severe on 
America's Holland citizens. 



Elias Boudinot's Copper Mine. 193 

Besides tlie Dutch church on Burnet and Schureman streets, 
of which at that time the Reverend John Leydt was pastor, 
there were two other houses of worship. The Presbyterian 
church stood on Burnet street below Lyell's brook, it having 
been built during the ministry of the Reverend Gilbert Tennent, 
which continued from 1726 to 1740. At this time the pulpit 
was occupied by the Reverend Thomas Arthur. Christ church, 
of the Episcopal congregation, had been partially erected since 
1743, though it was thirty years before the building of a steeple 
finally completed the structure. Its first permanent rector was 
the Reverend Mr. Wood, who was installed in 1747. New 
Brunswick, in addition to its milling and shipping interests, 
rejoiced in a copper mine that at this time gave promise of 
developing into an important industry. In the year 1748 virgin 
ore was ploughed up in a field belonging to Philip French, about 
three hundred yards back fi'om the river, and just north of the 
houses of the town. Elias Boudinot having leased the land, a 
company was formed, and in 1751 a shaft was sunk sixty feet 
and a large body of ore found. For a number of years 
many tons of pure copper were annually shipped to England, 
and the stockholders anticipated much prosperity for their enter- 
prise. But eventually, the ore vein being exhausted. New 
Brunswick awoke from its dream of becoming a great mining 
town, and settled back to the prosaic glories of its mills, and the 
much vaunted honor of being at the head of sloop navigation. 

We have loitered long enough in this Middlesex city. So 
has Johannes. And now we find him mounting his waiting 
horse ready to proceed on his journey : on crossing by the ferry 
scow, his route lies in a southeasterly direction along the ^' King's 
highway ; " a ride of less than two miles brings our traveller on 
the main street of the old village of Piscataway, flanked by 
lofty trees. Those of us who are familiar with the time-stained 
houses, old-fashioned gardens and aged churchyards of this 
early settlement know it to be now a far less important place 
than when in the heyday of youth, a half century and more 
before the date of Johannes' visit. In those good old colony 
times its men still loved the king, and met at Hull's tavern to 
drink his health in long draughts of fiery Madeira, or in modi- 
cums of more potent West India rum. His most gracious maj- 
13 



194 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

esty's governor, council, and burgesses have more than once 
met in this ancient burgh. On such occasions these road- 
ways, which now seem sunk in the torpor of ages of sleep, were 
enlivened by very important gentlemen wearing gold-laced 
cocked hats and full-bottomed wigs, and arrayed in broad- 
skirted scarlet coats, satin short-clothes, silk hose and burnished 
knee and shoe buckles ; who, while exchanging greetings and 
pinches of snuff, discussed the best interests of the colony. 
There were then social aspects and picturesque environments to 
the society of this old neighborhood that exist now but in musty 
traditions, and in occasional notes to be found in the town rec- 
ords — historical fragments of antiquity that, by chance, have 
floated to the shore from the swift current of the river of time. 

It will be remembered that in a previous chapter an account 
was given of how John Martin, Charles Gilinan, Hugh Dun, and 
Hopewell Hull, had removed to New Jersey from Piscataqua, 
New England, in response to the '* Concessions and Agree- 
ments" published in the East by the lords-proprietors, Berkeley 
and Carteret. They received a grant on the eighteenth of 
December, 1066, for the large area of territory which now 
embraces the township of Piscataway. Within twenty years 
settlers from New England and the old country had augmented 
the nucleus of population formed by the Piscataway families to 
about four hundred. Among the persons to whom land was 
allotted previous to 1690 are to be found the following names : 
Nicholas Bonham, 122 acres ; Benjamin Clarke, 275 acres ; 
George Drake, 424 acres ; Hugh Dun, 138 acres ; Benajah 
Dunham, 103^ acres ; Edmund Dunham, 100 acres ; John Fitz- 
Randolph, 225 acres ; Rehoboth Gannett, 224 acres ; Charles 
Gilman, 340 acres ; Hopewell Hull, 284 acres ; Benjamin Hull, 
innkeeper, 498 acres ; John Langstaff, 300 acres ; John Martin, 
334 acres ; Jeffery Maning, 195 acres ; John Mollison, 100 
acres ; Nicholas Mundaye, 101^^ acres ; Vincent Rongnion, 154J 
acres; John Smalley, 118^ acres; Edward Slater, 464 acres. 

The historian of East Jersey, the late W. A. Whitehead, 
avers that Benjamin Hull was an inn-keeper in Piscataway in 
1677, and that the name and business have continued connected 
up to the present day. Be this as it may, it is an extraordinary 
fact, and one well worthy of record that, with hardly an excep- 



Early Settlers at Piscataway. 195 

tion, each one of those early landowners has at the present time 
descendants living in the township. Those of Vincent Rongnion 
seem to have been well contented with the location chosen by their 
Huguenot forefather ; they have owned land in the vicinity of 
the village from that day to this, and at present persons of that 
name — since converted into Runyon — are in possession of over 
eight hundred acres, as follows : Mefford Runyon, 240 ; David 
D., 185; Peter A., 160; Noah D., 144 ; Isaac, 100. Vincent 
Rongnion was the ancestor of the Honorable Theodore Runyon, 
New Jersey's recent chancellor. He came from Poictiers, 
France, and must have settled in New Jersey before 1668, as 
his marriage license, signed by Governor Philip Carteret, is 
dated in that year. His wife was Anna, daughter of John 
Boutcher, of Hartford, in England. 

John Molleson, one of the original landowners, was considered 
a man of sufficient education to be town-clerk and recorder of 
the minutes of town meetings. He may have written a " darkly 
hand," but oh ! what spelling ! Here is his first entry : 

Piscataway 13 of Suptumber, 1711. At the town meting then choes William 
olding and James maning overseers for the puer and Isac Small and John Drak 
Seneor for the inshueing year asesers: which ofesses they agried execuit grates. 
The Kaiets is to be used by Discration of the asesers. 

John Molleson, Clark. 

At the forsaid meting it is agried that the hiring place shall be fensed 
sufficient. 

These town records offer some curious and interesting con- 
tributions to our knowledge of the beginning of things at 
Piscataway. From them we learn that Benjamin Hull, the first 
inn-keeper, figured in the two very different roles of judge and 
transgressor. Notwithstanding his occupation, in December, 
1692, as foreman of the grand jury he indicted several persons 
for drunkenness and breach of Sabbath ; while in June, 1694, 
he, himself, was "presented by y*" grand jury for keeping and 
allowing gaming at Cards, and Bowie and pins at his house." 
Edward Slater, another old settler, seems early to have " come 
to grief; " we learn from the town records that he was impris- 
oned in 1681 for having " uttered very pnishouse and Squer- 
illouse words Rendering the Government of the province, the 
Governor and Counsell Odyous in the Eyes and hearts of the 
people." Judging from the above entry odd rules as to the use 



196 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

of capital letters must have prevailed. Why should eyes have 
been honored with a capital, while that more important organ, 
the heart, was forced to beat with a small letter f Slater did 
not, apparently, remain in durance very long, as in 1683 he was 
again apprehended on the suspicion of being an escaped criminal 
from England, and in the same year was presented by the grand 
jury in an indictment of nine counts, " as a common nuisance 
and offence." 

Nothwithstanding the tribulations of Edward Slater, by 1685 
he seems to have been entirely restored to public favor. In that 
year he, with Hopewell Hull, John Fitz-Randolph, and others, 
was appointed one of a committee to superintend the building of 
a church edifice, the selectmen having on the eighteenth of 
January, 1685-6, passed the following resolution : 

At the Towne Meetinge then agreed yt tliere should be a raeetinge liouse built 
forthwith, the dinientions as foUoweth : Twenty foot wide, thirty foot Longe, and 
Ten foot between joyn ts. 

The Piscataway fathers appear to have been lax in prosecut- 
ing the work of erecting their first public building, for five years 
later the towm-book recites that Edward Slater, George Drake, 
and Isaac Smalley, were chosen " to discorse hopewell hull about 
the finishen of the towne house, and if hopewell hull refuse to 
finish it, that the above mentioned men have power to hire 
workmen to finish the saide house." This " meetinge-house " 
was for the Baptists, as that denomination seems to have estab- 
lished the first religious services in the township. The Duns, 
Drakes, Dunhams, Bonhams, Fitz-Randolphs and Smalleys, of 
the original settlers, were of that persuasion, and some Irish 
Baptists from Tipperary joined them in 1683. The first minister 
was John Drake, who, dying in 1739, was succeeded by Benja- 
min Stelle, of French extraction. Descendants ol this last 
" divine " are numerous hereabouts, and the name of the first 
railway station east of New Brunswick — Stelton — was derived 
from this family. We can gain some idea of the character of 
this first "meeting-house" from a letter AA^itten by a missionary 
of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign 
Parts in 1711 : 

Piscataqua makes a much greater congregation (than Amboy), and there are 
some pious and well-disposed people among them ; some come from good dis- 



New Jersey's First Seventh-Day Congregation. 197 

tances to this meeting, but there is nothing among us like the face of a Church 
of England : no surplice, no Bible, no Communion Table, an old broken house 
in sufficient to keep us from injuries of the weather, and where likewise the 
Anabaptists which swarm in this place do sometimes preach, and we cannot 
hinder the house belonging to the Town. 

The first congregation of Seventh-Day Baptists in New Jer- 
sey had its origin in this township, in the following manner : In 
the year 1700, Edmund Dunham, a Baptist exhorter and the 
owner of one hundred and ten acres of the town lands, felt called 
upon to admonish Hezekiah Bonham for working on Sunday ; 
whereupon Bonham defied him to prove divine authority for 
keeping holy the first day of the week. Dunham, after investiga- 
tion, failed to do so to his own satisfaction, consequently he himself 
renounced the observance of the first day. In the year 1705 he 
formed a congregation of Seventh-Day Baptists, and was 
appointed its pastor. This was the second church of that denom- 
ination in America, the first having been established in 1665 
at Newport, Rhode Island. The Piscataway Satm'day worship- 
pers sent their new minister to that colony for ordination, which 
he received on the eighth of September, 1705, at the hands of 
Elder William Gibson, who was holding a church meeting at 
Westerly. 

Edmund Dunham apparently gathered within his fold most, 
if not all, of the Dunns and Dunhams in the township, as 
on the early church books appear the names of Edmund J., 
Jonathan, Ephraim, Benejah, John, Azerial, Mary, Dorothy, 
Phebe, Dinah and Jane Dunham ; Hugh, Joseph. Hugh Jr., 
Micajah, Samuel Jr., Jonathan, Elizabeth, Hester, Rebecca and 
Esther Dunn The ministrations of this first pastor continued 
until 1734, when he died at seventy-three years of age, being 
succeeded by his son Jonathan, who preached until his death 
from small-pox at the age of eighty-six years in 1777. During 
the lifetime of the father services were held in private houses. 
In 1736 a church was erected on the road leading to Quibble- 
town — now New Market — and two miles south of that village. 
This building remained a sanctuary until 1802 when it was con- 
verted into a barn, for which purpose it is still used, the timbers 
being as sound as when taken from the forest. The second 
church building occupied the same site, but it gave way in 1835 
to the congregation's present structure which is located in the 



198 The Story ok an Old Farm. 

village of New Market. This church, in an existence of 
nearly two hundred years, has had but eleven ministers, and at 
present is in a flourishing condition. 

The first services, according to the rites of the church of 
England, were held in Piscataway in 1704, Queen Anne grant- 
ing a charter to the wardens and congregation as " St. James' 
Episcopal Church." Services were irregular until 1724, when a 
church edifice was completed. The pioneer clergyman of this 
parish was a hard-working missionary named Brook, who 
rode a circuit of fifty miles preaching at Elizabethtown, 
Perth Amboy, Cheesequakes, Freehold, Rocky Hill and Piscat- 
away. He entered the province in 1702 under the auspices of 
the "London Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign 
Parts," at a yearly salary of sixty pounds. " Besides preach- 
ing," as Humphries, the society's historian, says, '^ he used to 
catechise and expound fourteen times a month, which obliged 
him to be on horseback every day, which was expensive as well 
as toilsome. However, this diligence raised a very zealous 
spirit in many of the people." Mr. Brooks died while returning 
to England in 1707. His widow, who was the sister of Christo- 
pher Billop of Staten Island, seems to have been well content 
with the lot of a helpmate to a colonial pastor, as she afterward 
married the Reverend William Skinner. 

For several years after Mr. Brooks' death St. James received 
the occasional services of the Reverends Messrs. Vaughan and 
Halliday. Upon the completion of the church in 1724 Mr. Skinner 
became pastor, in which office, in connection with his home duties 
at Perth Amboy, he continued for thirty years, officiating on every 
third Sunday, on which occasions, it is said, he was appreciated by 
large assemblages. St. James' first church building sheltered the 
devotions of the parish for one hundred and ten years, when it was 
destroyed by the great tornado of 1835. The present structure 
was built and presented to the congregation by Joseph Foulke, 
of New York. It stands in one of the most ancient and interest- 
ing graveyards in the state. Two centuries of winds have sighed 
requiems through the waving branches of the venerable trees 
that brood over the seclusion of this little "God's acre." For 
we learn from the town records that, as far back as the year 
1690 ten shillings were set apart for " minding the burrial 



BONHAMTOWN. 199 

place, and to set it up with good white oacke or chestnut stakes, 
and bound with good withes." 

My readers, I can fancy, are crying out — '^ Enough of Piscat- 
away ! You are making too long a story of this township !" 
Permit me to offer the very personal excuse that it was the home 
of my ancestors. The Dunns and Dunhams are all in the writer's 
maternal ancestral line, of whom at least five generations lie 
buried under the sods of the churchyard of the ancient parish of 
Saint James. Well ! your warning is heeded ; at last this inter- 
esting settlement is left behind, and our cavalier rides on over 
the high levels of Middlesex. Soon another old village is in his 
path, the little hamlet of Bonhamtown, the point where Nicholas 
Bonham located his one hundred and twenty acres. This place 
would have remained unknown to fame beyond the circle of its 
immediate vicinity, had it not found itself — twenty-five years 
later — in the track of contending armies ; its name thus becom- 
ing historically embalmed in the reports of commanders of the 
opposing forces. The trend of our " solitary horseman" is now 
more easterly, and facing the salt water, he canters over a pleas- 
ant country of low hills, gently subsiding into shallow valleys, 
diversified with woods and patches of cultivated lands, orna- 
mented with homesteads. It was yet early in the afternoon 
when he came in sight of Perth Amboy — its unrivalled location 
presenting, then as now, a charming shore panorama of grove- 
crowned knolls, meadows of waving grass, bay, rivers and 
varied beaches. 




CHAPTER XV. 

Perth Amboy as a Provincial Capital — The Appearance the City 
Presented in 1752. 

To one possessed of antiquarian tastes there is a singulaJ 
pleasure in looking back through the long vista of years and 
picturing in the mind the appearance that a familiar place must 
have presented in those remote, and seemingly almost poetic 
days, known as colonial times. A professor of comparative 
anatomy is enabled by securing a few fossil remains to recon- 
struct a species of animal long since extinct. So the delver in 
days of yore, by the proper placing of his few historical facts, 
illumined by a well controlled imagination, and a fancy verging 
perhaps on the romantic and picturesque, essays to again bring 
to life a past social condition, and create appearances and fashions 
long out of date. 

Thus would we fain endeavor to rehabilitate in its antique 
dress this city of Perth Amboy that has dozed for two centuries 
amid its groves of sycamores and oaks, to bring out by descrip- 
tion certain aspects that will delineate society and types illustra- 
tive of pre-Revolutionary days in this portion of New Jersey. 
When in the full tide of its lusty youth this town had virile 
ambitions and aspired to be the metropolis of a new world. But 
those days, now long past, are almost forgotten, and for many 
decades — until the comparatively recent advent of new railways 
— this borough quietly slept on its pleasant banks by the wide- 
spreading waters, apparently well content to sit apart from the 
cares and vanities of its more successful rivals in trade and 
population. By drawing on Mr. Whitehead's chronicles of East 
Jersey, and by filling up the outlines of the little knowledge we 



Early New Jersey Governors. 201 

may have of the place and people in those olden times, we shall 
hope to present to the reader a fairly life-like picture. An 
endeavor will be made to unfold such a scene as met Johannes' 
eyes, when in this spring; of 1752 he rode over the high rolling 
lands bordering the Raritan and entered ancient Amboy — for it 
is ancient, having enjoyed the proud distinction of a city charter, 
and all the honors of a mayor and corporation, since the twenty- 
fourth of August, 1718. 

The dignity and importance of the borough at that time were 
by no means confined to the fact of its possessing municipal 
rights. From its natal day it had been the seat of government, 
and since the proprietors surrendered to Queen Anne their rights 
as rulers, royal governors had frequently made it their place of 
residence. The first chief magistrate under the Crown was 
Lord Cornbury, who also ruled New York, as did several suc- 
ceeding governors. He was a cousin of the queen ; there his 
nobility ended, for in personal habits and character he was of a 
low order. He pei'secuted Presbyterians and other dissenters, 
and violated the agreement entered into between the English 
and Dutch at the time of the capture of New Netherlands, 
whereby the latter were guaranteed religious liberty. Lewis 
Morris, in a severe letter to the secretary of state, charged him 
with all manner of malfeasance in his high office, and closed 
his communication in the following words : " He dresses pub- 
licly in women's clothes every day, and puts a stop to all public 
business while he is pleasing himself with that peculiar but 
detestable magot." On attaining to the earldom of Clarendon 
in 1708, this noble Englishman fairly fled from the colonies to 
avoid paying his creditors, many of whom were poor tradesmen. 

Lord Lovelace, his successor, arrived out in December of the 
same year, but his government had but well commenced when 
he died on the sixth of May, 1709. Then came Robert Hunter, 
of whom we have spoken at length in a previous chapter. This 
popular governor resigned in 1720 in favor of William Burnet, 
the son of the famous bishop, and god-son of the king of Eng- 
land, — William of Orange having stood as his sponsor and given 
him his name. He ruled till 1727, when he was removed to 
Massachusetts, and was succeeded by John Montgomerie. Both 
Governors Hunter and Burnet passed much time in their comfort- 



202 The Story of an Old Farm. 

able Amboy homes on the banks of the Raritan, and added 
greatly to the importance and pleasiu'e of the society of East 
Jersey. The latter governor is described as having been a man 
of gay and condescending disposition, the delight of men of sense 
•and learning, and the admired friend of the ladies to whom he 
was much devoted. He visited every family of reputation in 
the province, and letters to his predecessor, Hmiter, say that 
their writers do not know how the fathers and husbands may 
like the new ruler but they were sure the wives and daughters 
did so sufficiently. John Montgomerie was a well known cour- 
tier who had been a colonel in the household troops and groom 
of the bedchamber of the Prince of Wales, afterwards George 
II. There has been preserved some account of the per- 
sonal effects and equipage of this royal governor ; we are thus 
enabled to gain an inkling of the state in which a colonial mag- 
nate lived. His many articles of furnitm'e included an eight- 
day clock valued at forty dollars in our money, and a " line yel- 
low camlet bed '' estimated at seventy -five dollars. There was 
silver-ware in profusion, and the wines and liquors were set 
down at twenty-five hundred dollars. A barge with its acoutre- 
ments, one hundred and twenty-five dollars ; books, one thou- 
sand dollars ; and eight slaves, one of them a negro musician 
being valued at over one thousand dollars. In his stables V'ere 
one saddle horse, eight coach horses, two common horses, t.70 
breeding mares, two colts, and a natural pacing mare ; a coach and 
a four-wheeled chaise ; a fine suit of embroidered horse furniture, 
a servant's saddle, and two sets of coach harness, brass mounted; 
a postillion's coat and cape, together with saddles, holsters and 
housings. 

Montgomerie continued in office till his death in 1731, when 
the government was undertaken by William Cosby, who died in 
1736. For the third time witj^in five years death entered the 
gubernatorial mansion, smiting, this time, John Anderson, two 
weeks after he had commenced ruling as president of the council. 
For the next two years the government devolved upon senior 
councillor John Hamilton, who was an old resident of Perth 
Amboy, and the son of Andrew Hamilton, governor under the 
proprietors. He was relieved from the duties and honors of the 
office in 1738 by the arrival of a commission appointing Lewis 



Early New Jersey Governors. 203 

Morris as the first governor of the province separate from that of 
New York. He lived near Trenton, and was the son of that 
Captain Richard Morris, who in 1670 settled Morrisania on the 
Harlem river. His father died in 1672, leaving him a babe not 
yet a year old, of whom Mathias Nicholl, secretary of New York, 
wrote of as a " poor blossom of whom yet there may be great 
hope." The secretary's prophecy proved true ; this ^' poor 
blossom " grew to be a man of great force of character, with vir- 
tues and attainments which elevated him to important trusts and 
positions ; the influence he exerted among the people of the 
provinces of New York and New Jersey equalled that of any 
man of his time. Lewis Morris in 1691, when but nineteen 
years old, married a " Graham of the Isles ^^ of the family of the 
Earl of Montrose, and the daughter of James Graham, Attorney- 
General of New York. 

Morris died in 1746, and President Hamilton again came to 
the front, but, dying almost immediatel}', was succeeded by the 
next eldest comiciilor, John Reading, who continued in office 
one year. The name of this chief magistrate has been perpetu- 
ated in that of the township of Readington in Hunterdon, he 
having owned large tracts of land in that county. He lived in 
Amwell, now Raritan, township, about two miles north of Flem- 
ington, near where is now Stover's mills ; a portion of his planta- 
tion is at present owned and occupied by Philip Brown. Doctor 
Mott, Hunterdon's historian, tell us that he was a true Jersey- 
man, being identified with the interests of his province and 
county from boyhood. He lies buried in Amwell churchyard on 
that ancient thoroughfare, the York road. Acting-Governor 
Reading's family has further associations with New Jersey 
nomenclature from the fact that his daughter married John 
Hackett, an Irishman of ability and prominence, who gave his 
name to Hackettstown in Warren county. 

The governor in office at the time of the visit of Johannes to 
Araboy was Jonathan Belcher. On the eighth of August, 1747, 
while the early morning mists still lightly hung over the broad 
expanse of the Lower bay, all the people of the towTi had assem- 
bled on its banks to welcome that dignitary, who disembarked from 
a barge of the man-of-war Scarborough, on which he had crossed 
the Atlantic. He was escorted to the town hall amid the accla- 



204 Thk Stoky of an Old Farm. 

mations of the multitude, where he presented his commission — 
a portentous document of parchment of three sheets about two 
feet square, plentifully besprinkled with Latin, and weighted by 
a heavy pendent disk of stiff brown wax, bearing the royal arms 
of England. In a gracious reply to the loyal addresses of the 
council and citizens, he congratulated the people on the beautiful 
location and thriving appearance of their town. Notwithstand- 
ing his fair words, the governor, after making the customary 
tour of the province, established his home in EHzabethtown, 
where he died in 1757. Senior-councillor John Heading again 
exercised the office ad interim. In the following year Amboy 
had restored to her the glories of being the home of the king's 
representative. The new governor, Francis Bernard, landed on 
the fourteenth of June from H. M. S. Terrible, and established 
himself in the old Johnstone house on the bluff between the 
Long ferry and Sandy point. He soon became a favorite with 
the people, and it was to their great regret that he received 
orders from the home government to retire from the province 
and assume command of that of Massachusetts, where, imfor- 
tunately, he did not attain to an equal popvdarity. His suc- 
cessor, Thomas Boone, reached Amboy by land on the third of 
June, 1760, escorted to the Middlesex line by Captain Terrill's 
troop of horse from Elizabethtown, Avhere he was met by Cap- 
tain Parker's troop of Woodbridge. The '^New York ^lercury" 
of this month has a long account of the fetes, entertainments, 
and illuminations, incidental to his first visit to the different 
prominent towns of New Jersey. 

The British ministers evidently believed in the rotation in 
office of their representatives. Before the close of the following 
year Governor Boone was appointed to the chief magistracy of 
South Carolina. The '^ New York Gazette" of the twenty-sec- 
ond of October, 1761, announces the arrival of " H, M. S. 
Alcide, 64 Guns," having aboard Josiah Hardy, New Jersey's 
new governor. The same paper, in its issue of the fifth of 
November, gives an account of his landing at Elizabethtown- 
point, where he was received by prominent citizens and the mili- 
tary. Captains Terrill and Parker's troops escorted him to 
Amboy, where they were met by the public dignitaries and Cap- 
tain Johnstone's militia. He relinquished the government in 



Governor William Franklin. 205 

February, 1763, the authorities " expressing their estimation of 
the just regard he had displayed for the interests of New Jer- 
sey." We now reach the hist colonial governor, William, the son 
of Benjamin Franklin, who, without solicitation on the part of 
his father and when only thirty years of age, received the 
appointment. He reached Amboy on the twenty-fifth of Febru- 
ary, 1763, — an intensely cold day — escorted by the Middlesex 
troop of horse and numbers of the gentry in sleighs. The 
" New York Gazette" chronicles that he took possession of the 
government in the usual form, the ceremonies being conducted 
*' with as much decency and good decorum as the severity of the 
season could possibly admit of." The young governor is said to 
have hired one of the best houses in the town at an annual 
rental of sixty pounds — equalling one hundred and forty-four 
dollars. His salary was twelve hundred pounds — proclamation 
— or about three thousand dollars. In 1774, he took possession 
of the mansion erected by the proprietors, of late well known as 
the Brighton house, and recently converted into a home for Pres- 
byterian clergymen. The history of Franklin's administration is 
but a narration of the events preceding and the breaking out of 
the Revolution. In good time we shall have more to say of this 
royal governor. Meanwhile, we must return to Johannes, whom 
we left entering the city. 

Some portions of Perth Amboy are to this day peculiarly 
attractive because of the splendid growth of large trees. In 
early times the place is represented as having been most beauti- 
ful in this respect. The proprietors, in their published descrip- 
tion, asserted that ^' Amboy Point is a sweet, wholesome and 
delightful place ;" and it was further described as being '^ cov- 
ered with grass growing luxuriantly, the forest trees, as distrib- 
uted in groups, diversifying the landscape with light and shade, 
and all nature wearing the fresh aspect of a new creation." 
These characteristics at the time of our visitor's arrival had not 
disappeared. Great trees that cast a vast area of shade were 
still a distinguishing feature of the ancient capital, and its most 
popular pleasure-ground was a fine bit of locust timber on the 
banks of the Raritan, just west of High street. It rejoiced in 
the suggestively tender appellation of " Love grove." Under 
its cool shadows the towns-people gathered on summer afternoons 



206 The Story of an Old Farm. 

to enjoy the ocean breezes that came freighted with the balsamic 
odors of forest-clad Monmouth. Here in the long twilights colo- 
nial youths and maidens met to enjoy the agreeable prospect 
and each other's society ; and, in this sylvan retreat many a 
youthful troth was plighted to the pleasant musical accompani- 
ments of the river's murmuring waves. 

Another favorite resort of the citizens was the elevation over- 
looking the Raritan near Sandy point, devoted to the fairs and 
races. All ancient chronicles of the colony revert to this old 
English custom of " Fair days." The proprietors as early as 
1683 instructed their representatives that " it is not to be forgot- 
ten that, as soon as can be, weekly Markets, and Faires at fitt 
seasons, be appointed at Perth Towne." Three years later 
semi-annual fairs were authorized by the assembly, to continue 
three days in May and October. This custom prevailed till the 
time of the Revolution. These were days of great revelry and 
mirth. Horse racing and all manner of games were permitted — 
any description of goods and merchandise could be sold without 
license, and on this breezy pleasure-ground at such times were 
to be seen all the peddling, hawking, thimble-rigging, cudgel- 
playing, bustle and prevailing confusion that characterized such 
festivals in the old country. It was a time of general license, 
and, under the law, no one could be arrested during the continu- 
ance of the fair except for offences against the Crown and for 
crimes committed on fair day. 

To the east of "Love grove", at the foot of High street, was 
the " Long ferry " that George Willocks had devised to trustees 
for the benefit of St. Peter's church. The franchise and trust 
still continue, though it is nearly one hundred years since the 
last team was ferried over in the " scouw" to the Philadelphia 
road on the farther shore. Here, too, was the famous Long 
ferry tavern, a quaint structure of stone, with an odd sloping 
roof, dormer windows and high Dutch stoop. Built in 1684, it 
has but recently disappeared, and was considered the oldest 
house in Amboy. In early times it not only offered rest and 
refreshment for waiting passengers, but served as a rallying 
point for the gossip-loving citizens. In warm weather it must 
have been an inviting inn in which to take one's ease ; in the 
winter we can well imagine that " mine host" Carnes — a giant 



Perth Amboy's Town-Green. 207 

in stature — kept thrust in the open fire, a logger head, (a red 
hot poker,) ready on the arrival of guests to be plunged into 
cups of flip — a mixture of rum, pumpkin beer and brown sugar. 
It was a favorite hot drink in the colonies and it is said was 
far from being an unpleasant cold weather tipple. 

When our traveller rode into the rural city its plan was much 
the same as that of to-day. Smith street, then as now, was the 
centre of the retail trade, though occupied also by dwellings. 
At least one of its stanch stone houses, then standing, has 
endured the encroachments of time, though it has been removed 
from its original site on the west side of the street to a lot on 
Broad street. It was the home of the Farmar family, who set- 
tled in Amboy early in the last century. While at the time of 
which we write the location of the streets was much as now, the 
aspect they presented differed materially from the appearance of 
the thoroughfares of the prosaic Amboy of to-day. From a tall 
pole in the centre of the town-green, which interrupts High and 
Market streets, floated the royal cross of St. George ; while in 
one corner of the square stood what would now happily be 
unfamiliar objects, the stocks, pillory and whipping post — dread 
menaces to the evil-doers of that rude and turbulent period. 

Why is it that the founders of the towns and villages of this 
country so rarely established public greens ? Those sunny 
opens that are such pleasant features of English boroughs and 
hamlets, and which must of necessity strengthen the local 
attachments of a neighborhood. The play-ground of childhood 
— the rendezvous of youth — the verdant mead on which matur- 
ity and age assemble. There is something in the beauty and 
appropriateness of such a common bit of ground, in which all 
have equal rights, that reaches much beyond the gratification of 
the eye. Jt suggests a community of interests, where man is 
bound to man by affections that have been engendered by this 
little bit of sward — a sentiment that seems quite opposed to the 
selfishness that necessarily attaches to individual holdings. The 
instinctive fondness for such a spot by its joint owners must 
grow into an enlarged feeling, and expand into that expression 
of patriotism which can only be known by men when united in 
numbers and interests. It is a nursery of virtue and unselfish- 
ness. With rare judgment the successors and descendants of the 



208 The Story of an Old Farm. 

early proprietors have preserved their town-green — this attrac- 
tive relic of a by-gone age and of the wisdom of their predeces- 
sors. For over two hundred years it may be said to have been 
the theatre of all the events connected with the life of this com 
munit}', and to learn all that has transpired upon its emerald 
floor would be to turn over every page of Amboy's history. For 
two himdred years it has defied the demon of improvement — 
may it so do for all time. 

The county court-house and jail, occupying one building, our 
traveller found a prominent feature of this public square. It 
stood on the northeast corner of High street, and from 1718, 
to 1765 when it was destroyed by fire, it continued to be the 
focus of all the important events of the colony, and much of its 
pomp, parade and ceremony. Here not only the courts were 
held, but the be-wigged and be-rufiled members of the general 
assembly sat in solemn conclave, and enacted those severe laws 
that were then considered necessary to preserve the peace of 
the province and the honor of the king. Permit me to quote 
one deemed meet for the times by those ancient legislators : 

Tliat all women of whatever age, rank, profession, or degree, whether virgins, 
maids, or widows, who shall after this act impose upon, seduce, and hetray into 
matrimony any of his Majesty's subjects by virtue of scents, cosmetics, washes, 
paints, artificial teeth, false liair, or high-heeled shoes, shall incur the penalty of 
the law now in force against witchcraft and like misdemeanors. 

To this Jersey " Hotel de Villey" and the one that succeeded 
it, came with successive processions and cavalcades all the repre- 
sentatives of the English ministry from the days of the virtuous 
Queen Anne to those of the third Hanoverian king ; each telling 
the same story of the love borne by the Crown for its faithful 
American subjects. Such stories were always received with 
loud shouts of fealty from the loyal throats of the populace 
massed on the square. The time arrived, however, when differ- 
ent messages came from the monarch beyond the sea, and public 
tran(j[uillity was disturbed by the growls and threats of the 
British lion. Even then, though the spirit of liberty hovered 
around the ancient capital, and the Jersey people in general 
were electric with patriotic impulse and endeavor, many of 
Amboy's citizens refused to abandon their allegiance. A large 
element of its population, especially among the richer class, were 



Perth Amboy Residents in 1752. 209 

dominated in their sympathies by the many years' influence of 
royal power. At the close of the war but a very small propor- 
tion of those who had formed the colonial aristocracy remained 
residents of Amboy. 

The structure that in 1767 took the place of the court-house 
can be seen now, though no longer a public building. Its pre- 
cise fa9ade, lofty roof and antiquated belfry testify of by-gone 
days. Let us hope that no vandal hand shall be permitted to 
destroy this temple of the past. May present and future genera- 
tions guard this venerable structure that, honored by time, has 
been the silent witness of many scenes connected with that great 
struggle for justice and humanity, which terminated in 1783 so 
happily for the American people. 

On the southwest corner of Market street and the square, in 
1752, lived Thomas Bartow, who it will be remembered, as 
secretary of the province, recorded the deed that George Leslie 
gave to Johannes. The house stood in the midst of an attractive 
garden filled with the choicest fruit of that time, and Dunlap, 
the art historian, who while still a very small boy was Bartow's 
friend and daily companion, describes his person, dwelling and 
garden as being equally neat. He mentions him as being, some 
years later, a small, thin old man with straight gray hair, pale 
face, plain dark-colored clothes and stockings to siyt. His well 
polished square-toed shoes were ornamented with little silver 
buckles, and his white cambric stock, neatly plaited, was fas- 
tened behind with a silver clasp. 

It is interesting to picture in one's mind the houses of this 
provincial capital, and the worthies who occupied them when 
Johannes for the first time rode over its highways. On 
High street, in the rear of where is nctw the Merrit mansion, 
was '^ Edinborough Castle," the home of Andrew Johnstone, a 
son of that Doctor John Johnstone who had been joint owner of 
the Peapack patent with George Willocks. He was an impor- 
tant man in the colony, holding during his life various offices, 
and dying in 1762 as treasurer of the eastern division of the 
province, and one of his majesty's council. His obituary notice 
in the " New York Mercury " of the fifth of July, 1762, reads that 
he was " A gentlemen of so fair and worthy a character, that 
truly to attempt to draw it would be throwing away words." 
14 



210 The Story of an Old Farm. 

The homestead of his father, Doctor Johnstone, was on the banks 
of the Raritan, and later, in Governor Boone's time, was con- 
verted into the gubernatorial residence ; it was a spacious brick 
dwelling with extensive gardens and a fine orchard. A near-by 
residence on the river-side was that of John Watson, the first 
painter mentioned in American annals of art. He came from 
Scotland in 1 715, and made Amboy his home until his death at 
the age eighty-three, in the year 1768. Mr. Dunlap, in his 
'' History of the Art of Design," gives an extended notice of this 
early limner. He writes : 

After the painter's tirst visit to America he returned to Europe, and brought 
thence to his adopted country many pictures which, with those of his own com- 
position, formed no inconsiderable collection in point of numbers, but of their 
value we are ignorant. It is, however, a fact that the fir#t painter and the first 
collection of paintings of which we have any knowledge were planted at Perth 
Amboy. 

Mr. Whitehead, in speaking of this artist's dwelling, says : 

There were two houses, standing near each other, both belonging to Mr. 
Watson, one of them being appropriated to these paintings, which it is said 
covered the walls; but before the Revolution this house had decayed and been 
demolished. The other, occupied by the painter himself, and which disappeared 
during the struggle, was of wood, having its window shutters covered with heads 
of heroes, and of kings ' with awe-inspiring crowns ' — owing their existence to 
the taste and talents of the painter. 

His portrait represents him as being a man of full face and 
prominent features, wearing a huge curled wig which hung to 
his shoulders. 

The houses of the colonial gentry were generally sprinkled 
along the blufi^, where the most favored locations were early 
sought and secured. In most instances they were simple in 
construction and unambitious in character, but here and there 
was one of architectural merit, showing (m the part of its builder 
an appreciation of a design where outline and surroundings 
should bear some relation to each other. A pleasing example of 
this latter class has been preserved in a substantial stone 
homestead, which can be seen resting on the sloping bank of 
the sound, east of Water, and near Market, street. Its low 
eaves, solid simplicity and old-fashioned presence speak of a 
previous century, but its happy expressions of rural dignity do 
not seem at all out of place in this age of flimsy construction, and 
grotesque strivings after the extraordinary in domestic architec- 



Colonial Architecture. 211 

ture. It is believed to have been the dwelling of Samuel Nevill, 
before whom, as judge of the supreme court, George Leslie 
acknowledged his signature to the deed for the " Old Farm." It 
was in this year — 1752 — that Judge Nevill published, under the 
auspices of the colonial assembly, the first volume of his editioa 
of the laws of the province, and it is believed the book was 
written in this house. 

Not far off on the same street is a residential monument to 
famOy cohesiveness, the well-known Parker homestead. Seven 
generations of this family have lived within the hoary walls of 
this colonial mansion. One must be callous, indeed, to the charm 
of early associations who fails to appreciate the peculiar satisfac- 
tion which comes to those who feel that their home atmosphere 
has been consecrated by the lives and experiences of a continu- 
ous line of ancestry for so many years ; an ancestry whose 
influence has been transmitted through successive generations, 
bearing to their posterity the testimony of virtuous, useful 
and honorable lives. The more modern frame portion of this 
building was erected just previous to the Revolution, but the 
stone structure standing in the rear dates away back to the year 
1720. At the time of Johannes' visit it was inhabited by James 
Parker, his wife being the only daughter of the Reverend 
William Skinner of St. Peter's church. Mr. Whitehead 
describes him as a man of tall stature and large frame, possess- 
ing a mind of more than ordinary strength and vigor. He was a 
member of the king's council, and filled many local offices of the 
community, including that of mayor, which in those picturesque 
days was a position of much more honor and importance than 
it is in this practical age. 

The old parsonage, that had been devised by George Wil- 
locks to the congregation of St. Peter's, occupied a portion of 
the block bounded by Market, Water and Gully (Gordon) 
streets. Its first storey was of stone, with a wooden two-storey 
superstructure, and a roof converging to a square centre. The 
latter was probably its most attractive feature, as usually the 
quaint roofs of colonial houses, with their simple but effective 
outlines, added much to the agreeableness and dignity of their 
proportions. The date of the erection of this house is unknown, 
but it must have been some time previous to 1729, the year of 



212 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Willocks' death. It was taken down in 1844, but long before 
had lost its upper storey. But if I keep on speaking of the 
more important buildings of this provincial metropolis, you will 
think that in 1752 it was a place of fine residences. Not so ! 
these dwellings of the quality-folk were Amboy's architectural 
exceptions — not typical examples. Its houses, of which at that 
time there were about one hundred and iifty, were, as a rule, 
poor enough ; a visitor of a few years later, while recognizing 
the beauty of the location, writes, that "notwithstanding being 
the capital of the province, Perth Amboy has only the appear- 
ance of a mean village." 

So with our traveller ; as he made his way through the 
streets, he found many of their flanking buildings slovenly in 
appearance, showing them to have been hastUy put together. 
Their rough-hewn flat-boarded frames lacked the dignity of the 
log dwellings seen in the clearings during the morning journey ; 
these latter, with their feet buried in herbage, seemed less incon- 
gruous, and more in harmony with surrounding nature. Many 
of these Amboy houses were unpainted and already showed signs 
of the rustiness of age, but, bleached and patched by sun 
and shower, their ci'azy, weather-stained sides were less crude 
and staring than were the variegated colors of some of the newer 
houses, whose fronting gables and thick board shutters were 
painted white, while their remaining sides were covered with 
dingy red. Architectural taste was, of course, entirely wanting, 
and in most instances a single storey sufiiced for the needs of the 
occupants. 

Of churches there were two. In a previous chapter we have 
referred at length to the ancient altars and interesting memories 
of St. Peter's, whose spire rises near where the broad river 
rushes into the ba3\ Amboy's second denomination, owing to 
its large Scotch and English immigration, was, naturally, Presby- 
terian. Of the erection of its first church-building no record 
has been preserved, though the minutes of the Board of Proprie- 
tors show that in 1731 permission was given the congregation to 
'' build a meeting-house on the southeast comer of the Burial- 
Place on Back (State) street." " Before the Revolution this 
church had disappeared ; in the present edifice, that fronts the 
square, services were first held in 1803. The Reverend John Cross 



Theology in the Last Century. 213 

of Basking Ridge is said to have first supplied the Presbyterian 
pulpit, and among that denomination's historical flotsam rescued 
from the ocean of time is the fact that in 1735 Gilbert Tennent 
preached at Amboy on the comforting and encouraging topio of 
the " Necessity of Religious Violence to Durable Happiness." 

A text of severe sentiment, you will say ! — but at this time the 
spiritual shepherds were wont to feed their flocks with food 
abounding in strength rather than sweetness. The angel of 
mercy hovered aloft, while the avenging one stood in the dwel- 
ling, at the road side, in the pew, ever ready under the tutelage 
of the pastors to wield the flaming sword of justice. The stern 
Calvinistic tenet that election and perdition were predestined by 
the divine plan irrespective of human merit was taught and 
believed, and the believing lacerated many a tender heart. 

The religious atmosphere of the middle of the last century was 
dark with the heavy clouds of doctrine and theology. Polemical 
controversy was rife in the churches. Foreordination, predes- 
tination, election, and eternal damnation went hand in hand with 
free agency ; the efibrt to reconcile these conflicting and appar- 
ently opposing dogmas, provoked labored sermons from the pul- 
pit^ and prolonged arguments and discussions in farm-house, field 
and shop. Ministers waxed severely eloquent in their terrible 
warnings to the unregenerate ; while with equally solemn ear- 
nestness from such texts as ^' I could wish myself accursed from 
Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen," they preached to the 
pious and devoted ones of their congregations, ^' the doctrine of 
disinterested benevolence ;" a doctrine that proclaimed the 
necessity of entire self-abnegation, and a willingness to accept for 
one's self eternal condemnation, if such could redound to the great- 
est good of the greatest number, and God's ends be better accom- 
plished. 

The interpreters of the Scriptures held before their people as 
tests of abiding faith the necessity of eliminating from their 
religion every element of selfishness, in order that they might 
have minds and afi^ections so disposed as to be able to accept with 
complacency the possibility that it might be God's sovereign 
pleasure to damn them eternally. Such views of life and the 
future-state evolved a gloomy piety. Agonies of doubt beset the 
most faithful, when intent on severe internal examination in the 



214 The Story of an Old Farm. 

endeavor to discover evidences that they were not under the 
ban of God's wrath. Such earnest souls, after lives of the most 
conscientious well-doing, often died still uncertain of the attain- 
ment of eternal happiness. Jonathan Edwards, who died in 
Princeton in 1758, was capable in his sermons of producing so 
great pain to the quick sensibilities of his hearers that during 
his discourses the house would be filled with weeping and wail- 
ing auditors ; on one occasion another minister present is said to 
have cried out in his agony, "Oh ! Mr. Edwards ! is God not a 
God of mercy f This celebrated preacher succeeded the elder 
Burr, who died in September, 1757, in the presidency of Prince- 
ton college, but he did not take his seat until in February of the 
following year. Mr. Edwards held the position scarcely a 
month, dying while imdergoing inoculation for the smallpox. 
He has been called the turning point in the spiritual existence 
of the congregations of the last century. It is asserted that New 
England and New Jersey in the age following him, under the 
guidance of such disciples as his son, Dwight, Bellamy, Hop- 
kins, Brainerd and Tennent, gave more thought to religious phi- 
losophy and systematic theology than the same amount of popu- 
lation in any other part of the world. 




CHAPTER XVI. 

Social Aspects of Perth Amboy in 1752 — The Gentry — Slav- 
ery — Travelling. 

There was much of interest to Johannes In this provincial 
capital besides the churches, and the public and private buildings. 
The bustle, animation, and variety of its thoroughfares presented 
an appearance quite foreign to their present aspect ; for there 
was a picturesqueness in colonial times that must have added 
much to the light and shade and general effect of ordinary 
scenes. In those early days population occupied only the fringe 
or border of the great wastes and solitudes ; we have seen that 
New Jersey's cultivated lands were largely confined to a narrow 
strip extending from the Hudson to the Delaware. Belts of 
wilderness stretched across New York and into New England ; 
indeed, the whole country east of the Mississippi was covered 
with vast forests, with but occasional signs of civilization and 
cultivation along the borders of the sea, and in the valleys of the 
larger rivers. At the centres of population — one of which 
Amboy at that time fairly could claim to be — the people, congre- 
gating as they did from many quarters of the globe, formed to 
each other strong contrasts, and the local color of civilization 
must to the chance visitor have made an interesting picture. 

The Indians were still in goodly numbers about New Jersey 
towns, and they appeared much more like the children of the 
forest of our imagination than do those now to be seen on the res- 
ervations of the far west, whose distinguishing badge of semi- 
civilization is often a government blanket, and a battered silk 
hat adorned with bedrao^o-led feathers. These old-time red- 
men were much less imbued with or affected by the habits of 
Europeans. They came into the towns with skins, and also sup- 



216 The Story of an Old Farm. 

plied the people with baskets and wooden dishes and spoons. 
The rederaptioners — men, women and children who for a time 
owed personal servitude to individual masters — must have 
heightened the general effect ; and the trappers and hunters, 
fresh from the woods, with their rifles, powder horns, moccasins, 
and linsey shirts fringed with deer skin, contributed their bit of 
color and form to the kaleidoscopic appearance of the streets. 
Among the expatriated Irish, Dutch, Germans and English 
inhabiting the vicinity, there must have been many curious and 
picturesque specimens of the genus homo. Necessarily many of 
these later were worthless characters, and the pillory, stocks 
and whipping post on the public square doubtless had a marked 
influence in preserving the peace and proprieties of this rough 
age. Opposed to this latter type was the less conspicuous but 
more useful element of society, the sturdy yeomanry — the stout- 
hearted middle class ; men who themselves, or whose fathers 
before them, often had left the old country for political and 
religious motives rather than a mere desire for adventure and 
trade. " God sifted a whole nation," said stern, old Governor 
Stoughton of New England, " that he might send choice grain 
over in this wilderness." 

Those of my readers whose ancestral trees root in Rhenish 
soil, will be pleased to know that the published account of travels 
in America in the last century all corroborate each others' 
assertions in speaking of the Teuton portion of this latter class — 
the bone and sinew of the provinces. They bear universal tes- 
timony that popidation in the middle colonies was powerfully 
promoted by its German element ; a people who in their own 
country had been disciplined in habits of industry, sobriety, 
frugality, and patience, and were consequently peculiarly fitted 
for the many laborious occupations of a new land. Among the 
yeomen, husbandmen, and mechanics they were regarded as the 
most economical as well as the most industrious of the popula- 
tion, and the least attached to the use of rum and malt liquor. 
They were slow in contracting debts and were always endeav- 
oring to augment their means of subsistence. 

But it was the gentry, richly dressed in all the magnificence 
of the times, that presented in customs, manners, and apparel, 
the strongest contrast to the other actors on this stage of " auld 



The Gentry in Old Colony Days. 217 

lang syne." In colonial times there were in the provinces 
society distinctions now unknown. Both in town and country the 
gentry were as distinctive from the people at large as were the 
upper classes in England. Extensive land-owners, persons with 
important connections abroad, members of the king's council and 
the house of burgesses, and those near the government, were held 
in high consideration and ranked as the great men of their 
respective counties. Their personal dignity was sustained by 
their dress, manners, modes of life, and the civil and military 
offices distributed among them. Amboy, being at this time the 
capital, was eminently aristocratic, and presented social aspects 
and phases that would now be considered both brilliant and 
picturesque. 

New England is peculiarly rich in descriptive colonial litera- 
ture ; perhaps it would be difficult to add to its fund of informa- 
tion on this subject. Our poverty in this regard offers a field 
fuU of local color for the historian of old New Jersey society. 
Early church and county records, the archives of the historical 
societies and of the Board of Proprietors of East New Jersey, 
and the family manuscripts distributed throughout the state, are 
mines from which many rich historic social nuggets could be 
unearthed by the patient delver ; and a most interesting work 
compiled. In the absence of such a volume, that we may learn 
something more of the Amboy of the middle of the last century, 
let us summon a member of his majesty's council from his bed of 
mould in St. Peter's churchyard. Perhaps he may be able to 
tell us of social events and observances in old colony days. 

Here he comes! making his stately old-fashioned way along 
Smith street. He cuts a strange figure, in this work-a-day world 
of ours, with his broad- skirted scarlet coat — white silk waistcoat 
embroidered with flowers — black satin breeches, and paste knee 
and shoe buckles. As he tickles his nose with snuff from a gold 
box, his be-wigged head shakes despondingly under its odd 
three-cornered covering. He looks disappointed — he is disap- 
pointed ! When this king's councillor stepped out of his grave 
into the busy nineteenth century, with its wonderful achieve- 
ments in science and progress, he expected to find Perth Amboy 
a great city. To him and his fellows of the olden time it had 
seemed designed by nature for an important commercial metrop- 



218 The Story of an Old Farm. 

olis. Hopes had been entertained that, owing to its nearness to 
the sea and its unrivalled harbor, commerce would centre here, 
and that for all time New Jersey's capital would be of great 
political and commercial consequence. Alas, vain hopes ! — he 
finds it a city but in name. 

The councillor in all his magnificence seems oddly out of place 
among the ugly, modern, brick shops of this business street. We 
will seat him in a high-backed chair in a broad hallway of one of 
the old houses of his own time — now he appears in a more appro- 
priate setting. You need not offer him a glass of whiskey ! he 
is not acquainted with the beverage. Rum punch ? yes ! he 
will take that ; — 1 doubt not but that he and his co-councillors 
have swallowed many a jorum of such toddy while wrestling 
with knotty questions affecting the good of the province. Now 
that our colonial friend has washed the dust of nearly a century 
and a half from his ancient throat, let us hear what he has to 
say. Evidently, when in the pristine glory of existence, he was 
a gallant man for his first topic is the ladies ; how they 
apj)eared — like birds of paradise, if he is to be believed ; with 
stuffed satin petticoats, taffetas and brocades, tall hats, lofty 
coiffures, long feathers, powder and patches. Their gowns were 
buoyed out one or two feet on either side of the hips, but not in 
front or behind, consequently — as he tells us with a chuckle — a 
lady of fashion when in full dress, in order to gain admittance to 
her own door, was forced to present her flanks first, and thus 
sidle in like a crab. 

Our "■ resurrected one " describes the flutter in Amboy society 
caused by the arrival of the first theatre company to the colonies 
and its presenting plays in the town-hall on the public green ; 
he says that the ladies in order to secure seats were obliged to 
send their black servants early in the afternoon to occupy them 
until the time of the performance. This theatrical company was 
under the management of the Hallams, who first opened with it 
in America in 1752. Dunlap, who was born in Amboy, asserts 
that he has heard old ladies speak in raptures of the beauty and 
grace of Mrs. Douglas — the leading lady of the company — and 
the pathos of her personation of the character of Jane Shore. 
Our New Jersey ancestors took more kindly to the stage than 
did their brethren of Massachusetts. The assembly of that 



The Keminiscences of a King's Councillok. 219 

province in 1750 prohibited theatrical representations because — 
as the bill recited — " they tend greatly to increase immorality, 
impiety, and a contempt of religion." This action of the legisla- 
ture was occasioned by a tragedy having been acted at the 
British Coffee-house in Boston by two English officers, assisted 
by some young men of the town. 

A graphic portrayal is given by the councillor of the appear- 
ance of the gentlemen and ladies on Sunday mornings, as they 
assembled on the bluff to worship at St. Peter's : the dignified 
walk of the men, with crimson and gilt garments, silk stockings, 
cocked hats and tall gold-headed canes ; and the young lads — in 
dress, brilliant but ludicrous reproductions of their elders. 
The ^^ grand dames''' with high heels and stiff stays came 
ballooning along, their voluminous skirts swaying and fluttering 
in the fresh sea breeze. With what ceremony did they greet 
each other ! As the men raised high in air their gold-laced 
hats, and bowed low their curled heads, the ladies, stopping 
short in their promenade, placed one foot twelve inches behind 
the other and dropped a formal, stately and prolonged curtsey. 

It is very agreeable listening to his tales of the ostentation 
and parade at New Jersey's capital in the hey-day of its youth : 
how one '^ Moneybaird," conveyed to Lord Neil Campbell's son 
John, all his Amboy interests, in consideration of Campbell's 
sending a footman to hold his stirrup and wait on him during the 
meetings of the assembly ; how the mayor, while acting offici- 
ally, had a mace-bearer who carried before him this ancient 
insignia of corporation rank ; how the judges, while sitting on 
the bench, wore judicial wigs and resplendant robes of office, 
and how it was obligatory for counsellors-at-law, when pleading 
before the bar of the supreme court, to be arrayed in gowns and 
bands as worn by barristers in England.* He has much to say 

* On the eleventh of May, 1791, the leading lawyers of the State, among them 
Joseph Bloomfield, Richard Howell, Elisha Boudinot, James Linn, Richard 
Stockton, Frederick Frelinghuysen and Andrew Kirkpatrick, petitioned the jus- 
tices of the supreme court showing : " That the wearing of Bands and Bar- 
gowns is found to be very troublesome and inconvenient, and is also deemed by 
your petitioners altogether useless. Your petitioners therefore pray that the 
rule of this court made for that purpose may be vacated." 

"Whereupon the Court taking the said petition into consideration, are pleased 
to grant the prayer of the petitioners, and do order that the Rule of the Court, 
which requires the wearing of Bands and Bar-gowns be vacated." 



220 The Story of an Old Farm. 

of the flourish and ceremonies attendant upon court days ; of 
the judges on circuit being met outside of the town by the sheriff, 
justices of the peace, and other gentlemen, on horse-back, who 
escorted them in honor to their lodgings. At the opening and 
closing of court, in going to and from the court-house, the judges 
were preceded by the sheriff and the constables carrying their 
staves of office, and all evil-doers trembled in the presence of the 
august procession. 

And now he entertains us with descriptions of the grand balls 
given at the town-hall in honor of royal governors ; where the 
dancing was not confined to the youthful belles and beaux, but 
all ages of the gentle-folk participated ; stepping the decorous 
minuet or going down the middle in the but little less dignified 
contre-dance. Altogether, in the last century this home of our 
narrator must often have been a gala Amboy. He coidd give us 
more interesting information, if he would, as to its historic charms 
and associations, and the manners and customs of its people. But 
the old gentleman is running down ; his voice is beginning to 
cackle. We will relegate him to that mysterious shade from 
whence he came. Exit, the king's councillor ! 

There was the dark side to this old-time picture — the negroes. 
The evil of slavery took deep root in colonial New Jersey. 
The reason is readily understood when we remember that in the 
early days of the province the slave trade was encouraged by 
the English people, fostered by the home government and 
enforced by the action of the British ministry. In 1702 Queen 
Anne instructed the governor of New York and New Jersey '' to 
give due encouragement to merchants, and in particular to the 
Royal African Company." Up to the time of the Revolution 
Great Britain directed her colonial governors to combat the 
attempts made by the colonists to limit the slave trade ; and 
under pain of removal to decline assent to any restrictive laws. 
Only one year before the American congress — in 1776 — prohib- 
ited the slave trade, the Earl of Dartmouth addressed the fol- 
lowing words to a colonial agent : 

We cannot allow tlie colonies to check or discourage, in any degree, a traffic so 
beneficial to tlie nation. 

During a debate in the house of commons on the question of 
the suppression of this trade, a Aviso legislator produced 



Colonial Slave Trade. 221 

a labored argument against its abolition, on the ground of 
injuries that would result to the market for the refuse-fish of the 
English fisheries, which were purchased in large quantities by 
West India planters for their slaves. This astute debater was 
Brook Watson, who was called an American adventurer, and who 
not only became a member of parliament but afterwards lord- 
mayor of London. We are able to relate one incident in the life 
of Watson, where he was of advantage to the world at large. It 
was to all our good fortunes that when a small boy he fell over- 
board in the harbor of Havana and just escaped being devoured 
by a shark. This gave to the brush of the great American art- 
ist, Copley, the subject for his well-known painting, "The Res- 
cue of a Boy from the Jaws of a Shark." 

The extent of the importation of slaves in the province of New 
Jersey is unknown, but it is estimated that before the Revolution 
between three and four hundred thousand negroes were intro- 
duced into the American colonies. Tha Abbe Raynal supposes 
that the number of blacks taken from Africa by Europeans 
before 1776 to have equalled nine millions. Hiine, the Grerman 
historian of the slave trade, considers these figures too small ; Mr. 
Bancroft affirms that the English importations in all the conti- 
nental colonies and in the Spanish, French and English West 
Indies to have been nearly three million souls, to say nothing of 
two hundred and fifty thousand thrown into the sea. He esti- 
mates that the profits of English merchants in this traffic, previ- 
ous to 1776, were not far from four hundred million dollars. 

This historian draws in strong outline a sad pictm'e of the 
miseries endured by the blacks while on the voyage from Africa. 
Small ships that could penetrate the shalloAv rivei's and bayous of 
the coast were used, and often five hundred negroes were stowed 
in vessels of not over two hundred tons burden. They were 
generally chained in pairs by the ankles ; and below decks, 
when sleeping, each was allowed a space of but six feet by six- 
teen inches. For exercise they were made to dance and caper 
on deck to the tune of a whip. The Africans were chiefly 
gathered from various points in the far interior of the dark con- 
tinent, in order that the freight of a single ship might be composed 
people of different languages and nations. When they reached 
the sea-coast at imfavorable seasons of the year, diseases were 



222 Thk Story of an Old F.\inr. 

engendered which culminated on the voyage ; this, together 
with the narrow space afforded their manacled bodies, the bad 
air, foul stenches and limited food and water, caused a death 
rate often equalling fifty and never falling below twelve per- 
cent of the shipment. Sailing-masters on approaching a slaver 
at sea made it the rule, when possible, to keep to the windward 
in order to avoid the horrible odors that belched from the open 
ports and hatches of ships laden with human cargoes. The 
ingenuity of man, eager to torture his fellow-beings, could hardly 
have planned a more complete hell than a crowded slave ship on 
a protracted voyage. The horrors of such a jouraey are best 
exemplified by the fact that no journal of a trip from Africa to 
the United States is extant, though it is well known, that slave 
ships repeatedly entered every port south of Rhode Island. 

Strange as it may seem, the men who sailed these ships 
appeared to be ignorant of the fact that they were doing the 
devil's Avork. Neither the captains of slavers, nor the persons 
comprising the companies who employed them, seemed to have 
considered that they were practising on their fellow-men revolt- 
ing cruelty, and hideous wrong. This was so, at least, in the 
earlier days of the traffic. Sir John Hawkins commanded the 
first English expedition to Africa for slaves. His squadron com- 
prised four vessels, and to their captains he issued the following 
sailing orders': " Serve God daily ; love one another ; preserve 
yom' victuals ; beware of fire ; and keep good company." So 
successful was he in this and subsequent voyages that Queen 
Elizabeth rewarded him by granting him permission to wear on 
his crest " a demi Moor, bound and captive." Doctor Hale, in 
the third volume of that treasury of historical writing, the " Nar- 
rative and Critical History of America" — edited by Justin 
Winsor — says that " Hawkins sailed on the ship Jesus with faith 
as serene as if he had sailed on a crusade." At one time, while 
on the first voyage, this navigator's ships were so long be-calmed 
as to nearly cause starvation. But, as this pious slaver recounts : 
^'Almighty God, who never suft'ereth his elect to perish, sent us 
the ordinary breeze." While Hawkins' party was gathering 
together liuman cargoes on the Guinea coast, the crews were 
set upon by the natives with murderous intent. But again, as 
he narrates, " God, who worketh all things for the best, would 
not have it so, and by Him we escaped -without danger." 



The New England Slave Trade. 223 

In contemplating the slave trade as connected with our own 
country we must not fall into the error of thinking that the 
infamy of the traffic attached only to the people of the south^ 
where the greater number of slaves were marketed. It was the 
well-to-do deacons and church members of New England who 
controlled the business : men who deemed it a sin to pick flow- 
ers on the Sabbath ; who thought .it wrong to stroll along the 
banks of a stream, or wander in the woods on that day ; men 
who would dispatch the tithing man to arrest the stranger who 
was hurrying through their town on Sunday on an errand of 
mercy. The history of that time reveals Peter Faneuil, on the 
one hand piling up profits from his immense slave trade, while, 
on the other occupied in private and public charities, and in 
the erection of the cradle of liberty in Boston. In the last cen- 
tury the coasts of Mozambique and Guinea were white with the 
sails of Massachusetts and Khode Island slavers. These vessels 
on the outward voyage were loaded with New England rum, 
which was traded to African chiefs for prisoners taken in their 
tribal wars. These blacks, together with such others as the 
ship-captains had been able to steal, were then carried to one of 
the West India islands, or to a southern American port, and 
there exchanged for molasses. This cargo was brought to New 
England and converted into rum for a further shipment to 
Africa; thus a three-fold profit was secured on each voyage. 
In the year 1 750 Newport carried on a most extensive business 
of this character I three hundred distilleries were in operation, 
and the tonnage of the vessels lying at the town's wharves 
exceeded that of the city of New York. Mrs. Stowe in her tale, 
" A Minister's Wooing," has portrayed in the most interesting 
manner the awakening of the New England conscience as to the 
sinfulness of buying and selling human souls. 

As at the time of Johannes' visit Perth Amboy was New Jer- 
sey's chief port of entry, the blacks were to be seen there in 
goodly numbers : many of them were freshly imported, bearing 
their tribal marks, and exhibiting their native characteristics, as 
if still inhabiting the wilds of Guinea. It was thought desirable^ 
when possible, to have the slaves brought into the colonies from the 
West Indies rather than direct fnmi Africa, as after remaining for 
a time at Barbadoes or one of the other islands they were much 



224 The Story of as Old Farm. 

better able to endure the severities of the American climate. In 
1757 the British West Indies contained a total population of a 
little less than three hundred and thirty thousand souls, of which 
two hundred and thirty thousand were slaves. Mr. Whitehead 
says that barracks stood on the corner of Smith and Water 
streets, in Amboy, from where the negroes, on landing, were dis- 
tributed in the province. They were eagerly sought for by the 
settlers and were in the service of all families able to pay from 
forty to one hundred pounds for a man or woman, according to 
age. A child of two or three years sold for from eight to foui'teen 
pounds. As showing the value of slaves in the last century, Mr. 
Snell, in his Somerset historical compilations, publishes an inven- 
tory of the personal effects of Theunis Post, one of the '' helpers " 
of the North Branch Reformed church, who died in 1764 in 
Branchburgh township, near the mouth of the Lamington river. 
The following chattels are mentioned : " One negro named Ham, 
valued at £70 ; one negro named Isaac, valued at £30 ; one 
negro named Sam, valued at £70 ; one negro girl named Betty, 
valued at £10 ; one negro named Jane, valued at £60 ; one 
negro wench named Sawr, valued at £30." The last name is 
short for Saertje, the Dutch diminutive for Sarah. 

As the character of these imported, or more properly speak- 
ing, stolen negroes, were necessarily savage, and but little under- 
stood by the Jersey people, they were naturally much feared, 
and the most severe laws were enacted by the colony to insure 
their control and subjection. One of the official acts that con- 
stables were the most often called upon to perform was that of 
whipping slaves for minor offences. Any negro found five miles 
from home it was the duty of these officers to arrest, and to flog 
with a whip, into the thongs of which fine wire was plaited that 
the severity of the punishment might be increased. For this 
service the owners of the derelict blacks were obliged to pay 
the constables five shillings, which materially augumented the 
income of those officials, and added largely to the value and 
importance of the position. 

The blacks, on arrival, were physically powerful and good 
workers, but without much power of reasoning or of controlling 
their undisciplined imaginations. Though barbarians, their 
affections were strong, and the marked progress made by negroes 



Cruel Punishment of New Jersey Slaves. 225 

in America may be said to be largely due to that fact. They 
soon outgrew their savagery, and, affiliating in their sympathies 
with their work and the lives of their masters, in a very few 
years became an attached portion of the domestic life of the Jer- 
sey people. In Somerset coimty, especially, the slaves soon fell 
imder the sway of kindly influences, and became almost portions 
of their owners' families. They were comfortably clad ; when 
sick, well cared for 5 and even to this day old residents tell 
pleasant tales of the affection existing between our forefathers 
and the old-time family and farm servants. 

But before the whites had in part advanced and civilized the 
blacks, and learned from experience the weakness and strength 
of their bondsmen's characters, much cruelty was inflicted 
through fears of risings and rebellions. The ^'New York 
Gazette " of the twenty-fifth of March, 1734, gives an account of 
a threatened rising early in that year in the vicinity of where is 
now Somerville, in consequence of which several negroes, two at 
least, were hmig. Punishments were extremely severe ; murder 
and assaidt often insured the culprits being burned alive, and 
for even petty thefts and misdemeanors they were hung with 
short shrift. On the twenty-third of September, 1694, John 
Johnstone — he of the Peapack patent — while sitting as presid- 
ing justice of the Monmoath court of sessions, sentenced a negro 
convicted of murder ra the following language : 

Caesar, thou art found guilty by thy country of those horrid crimes that are 
laid to thy charge; therefore, the court doth judge that thou, the said Cfesar, shall 
return to the place from whence thou earnest, and from thence to the place of 
execution, when thy right hand shall be cut off and burned before thine eyes. 
Then thou shalt be hanged up by the neck till thou art dead, dead, dead ; then 
thy body shall be cut down and burned to ashes in a tire, and so the Lord have 
mercy on tliy soul, Csesar. 

In those days of severe punishments the penalty followed 
closely after conviction. On the tenth of January, 1729, a slave 
named Prince was tried at Perth Amboy for murdering one 
William Cook, and being found guilty was sentenced to be 
burned alive '^ on ye twelfth of this Inst." He was executed on 
the day appointed. In the year 1738 a negro belonging to 
Robert Hooper was burned at the stake at Rocky Hill for hav- 
ing killed a chUd of his overseer. On the fifth of July, 1750, in 
a ravine just north of Perth Amboy, two negroes were bvumed at 
15 



226 The Story of an Old Farm. 

the stake ; one for murdering his mistress, Mrs. Obadiah Ayers, 
who had mildly censiu'ed him for misconduct ; and the other for 
being an accessory to the fact. Mrs. Ayres was seated at her 
own window when she was shot by the first negro, with a gun 
procured for him by the second. In these more lenient days 
the accessory would have escaped with a lighter pimishment ; 
he was a mere lad, and, as was shown at the trial, had been coerced 
by fear into aiding the elder and more vicious negro. At the 
execution all the slaves of the neighborhood were obliged to be 
present, that the scene might serve as an exemplary warning and 
a terrible example. 

Numerous instances might be given of the severity with which 
black offenders were punished. There is on record a chronicle 
of the hanging of a negro in 1750 for theft, the execution taking 
place at the junction of the Woodbridge and New Brimswick 
roads, a little way out of Amboy. We have another accomit of 
an auto-de-fe, in which Sheriff Abraham Van Doren is pictured 
on his horse, riding with drawn sword between the spectators and 
a fire, in which was burning a negro murderer. This was at 
Hillsborough (Millstone) in 1752, the sufferer having been con- 
victed there of killing his master, Jacob Van Nest, who lived 
near Milltown, in Branchburgh township. This black wretch 
was large and athletic, and for a long time had been considered 
dangerous. In a fit of passion he struck his master a murderous 
blow with an axe as he dismounted from his horse at his stable 
door ; the negro's anger was occasioned by the discovery that 
his master had helped himself to some tobacco from the slave's box. 
This distressing occurrence does not seem to have prejudiced the 
family against the owning of slaves, as it will be seen by the fol- 
lowing copy of a bill of sale that the murdered man's son Peter 
purchased two, a few years later : "July 10, 1768, John Van 
Nest, of Bridgewater [now Branchburgh] sold to Peter Van Nest, 
A certain Neger Winch named Mary and a neger boy named Jack 
for the sum of £66, York currency." 

In 1791, bm'ning seems to have been abandoned as a punish- 
ment for negroes, one being hanged for murder in that year in 
front of the old coui't-house at Newark. As was the custom the 
condemned was taken to the First Presbyterian church, where 
his funeral sermon was preached by Doctor Uzal Ogden. Mr. 



New Jersey Slavery Statistics. ' 227 

Whitehead narrates that the church was crowded, and that the 
good domine, in alkiding to the repentance of the negro, thought- 
lessly finished his discourse by impressively expressing a hope 
that the latter end of his numerous hearers might be like the 
criminal's. 

In the province of New Jersey slavery especially flourished 
because of its large Dutch and German population ; and the 
greatest number of slaves were to be found in the counties 
where those races predominated. New Jersey's inhabitants, all- 
told, in 1726 numbered 32,442, the negroes counting 2,581. The 
same year Somerset possessed 2,271 souls, white and black, the 
latter numbering 379. This county was in that year exceeded 
in negro population only by Monmouth and Bergen. In the year 
1738, out of a total population of 47,369, the province possessed 
3,981 slaves. Somerset county in the previous year had a popu- 
lation of about 4,500, of whom 732 were slaves. The census for 
the year 1790 places the entire Ncav Jersey population at 
169,954, of whom 11,423 were slaves. Ten years later — 1800 
— the total population had increased to 211,149, the slaves num- 
bering 12,422. Thi^ was a greater number of bonds-people 
than was possessed by any other state north of Maryland except- 
ing New York, which had 20,613. Delaware had but 6,153, 
Pennsylvania 1,706, Connecticut 951, New Hampshire 8, and 
Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont none at all. In this year, 1800, 
the slaves of Somerset numbered 1,863, out of a total population of 
12,813 ; this was more than that possessed by any other county in 
the state excepting Bergen. Morris, the adjoining county to 
Somerset, at that time having a population of nearly 18,000, 
owned but 775 slaves. In 1810 slavery had entirely disappeared 
in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts. Rhode 
Island's holdings were 108, Connecticut's, 300, Pennsylvania's, 795, 
Delaware's, 4,177, New Jersey's, 10,851, New York's, 15,017. In 
this year — 1810 — Somerset's slave population was 1,968, still far 
in advance of all other counties excepting Bergen, and only two 
hundred behind that Dutch community. Between the years 1804 
and 1820 a series of laws wei'e enacted tending toward a gradual 
abolition. They provided that every child born of a slave 
within the state of New Jersey after the fourth of July, in the 
year 1804, should be nominally free, but should remain the ser- 



228 The Story of an Old Farm. 

vant of the owner of the mother until the age of twenty-five if 
a male, and twenty-one if a female. So beneficial were the 
results of the operation of these laws that we find by the census 
of the year 1830 Somerset's full slaves were reduced to seventy- 
eight in number. 

At Amboy Johannes had the choice of two leading taverns ; 
one of them kept by John Gluck, the other by Obadiah Ayres. 
There was no choice as to expense, as the justices of the peace, 
at the October quarter sessions of 1748, had established the fol- 
lowing uniform and moderate rate of charges for all the taverns 
of the county: "Hot meal of meat, etc., 10*?; Cold meal do, T*?; 
Lodging per night 4*^; Rum by the quartern 4'.'; Brandy do, 
6'?; Wine by the quartern 2'',8'^; Strong beer do, 5"?; Cyder do, 
\ 4^; Metheglin do, l^'jG'?; Lunch do, l!',2^. Provision for Horses: 
Oats by the quart 1^'?; English hay per night 1^,0'?; ditto for 
24 hours 1?',6'^| Salt or fresh hay per night 8^; ditto for 24 hours 
1?,0?." These inns were rival hostelries, each being the head- 
quarters of opposition lines of boats and stages to New York and 
Philadelphia. Daniel O'Brien, in October, 1750, had established 
the first line by this route. His sloop left New York every Wed- 
nesday ; the passengers were supposed to «pend Thursday night 
at John Gluck's in Amboy, a stage-wagon leaving on Friday 
morning for Bordentown, where another sloop proceeded to Phil- 
adelphia. His advertisement promised to carry passengers 
through in forty-eight hours less time than did the stage which 
travelled the old road from New Brunswick to Trenton. The 
time actually consumed was from five to eight days. O'Brien 
could be " spoke with at the house of Scotch Johnny in New 
York on Mondays." The success of the above line was so great 
as to induce some Philadelphians in 1751 to establish an opposi- 
tion. Their sloop started from the Quaker City at the "Crooked 
Billet Wharf" every week for Burlington, " from where" — as 
their advertisement read — " at the sign of the Blue Anchor, a 
stage-wagon with a good awning will run to the house of Oba- 
diah Ayres at Perth Amboy, where good entertainment is to be 
had for man and beast." The advertisement goes on to lay 
much stress on the fact that the sloop of this line, sailing between 
Amboy and New York, had a fine cabin fitted up with a tea 
table. 



Stage Routes Across the State. 229 

The stage route referred to as passing over the old road, had 
been established in 1742 by William Atlee and Joseph Yeats. 
They sold out in 1744 to one Wilson, who ran his stage-wagon 
twice weekly, leaving the Delaware at Trenton on Monday and 
Thursday, and New Brunswick on Tuesday and Friday. Pro- 
fessor Kalm, before quoted, when on his way to New York from 
Pennsylvania in 1 748, attribiited the great prosperity of Tren- 
ton to the number of travellers that journeyed that way from 
Philadelphia. He remarked on the many stage and freight 
wagons starting from Trenton ; and writes that its inhabitants 
largely subsist by the carriage of people and aU sorts of goods 
across to New Brunswick. 

Wilson's charge for carrying a single passenger in his stage- 
wagon from the Delaware to the Raritan was two shillings and 
six pence, with an extra payment for luggage. The fare by 
sloop from Philadelphia to Trenton was one shilling and six 
pence, in addition each passenger being obliged to pay extra 
for luggage, and provide for himself food and drink. This last 
was important, as, though the distancre was not great, adverse 
winds often prolonged the voyage into many tedious hours. 
From New Brunswick, passengers had a choice of three routes 
to New York : by sloop ; by way of stage-wagon to Elizabeth- 
town-point, thence by sloop ; and by way of stage-wagon to 
Amboy, crossing by Willocks ferry to Staten Island, crossing to 
Long Island at the Narrows, and thence to Flatbush and the 
Brooklyn ferry. The inhabitants of the Raritan valley and of 
the vicinity of Flatbush were at this time in close alliance. 
Late in the seventeenth and early in the eighteenth centuries 
the Dutch had taken up all of the agricultural lands on the west 
end of Long Island ; consequently many of the second genera- 
tion of this Holland stock were forced to seek tillable acres in 
East Jersey. Thus the ancestry of such well known Somerset 
and Middlesex families as the Van der Veers, Van Nostrands, 
Van Dykes, Hagamans, Cornells, Beekmans, Polhemuses, Sut- 
phens, Suydams, and others, were all migrators from the Flat- 
bush neighborhood. 

At this time there was no well-established cross-country road 
between Trenton and Amboy, though John DaUey had in 1745 
surveyed 'the line of a highway, and set up marks every two 



230 The Story of an Old Farm. 

miles as a guide through the woods. In 1756 another stage 
route was established between the Quaker City and New York. 
It was called the " Swift, Sure Coach Line," and travelled the 
old York road, crossing the Delaware river at Lambertville ; 
thence to Flemington, Somerville, Bound Brook, Plainfield, and 
along the base of the mountain through Springfield to Elizabeth- 
town-point, where a packet sloop completed the journey. It 
was along this route that, about 1846, the first telegraph line 
between New York and Philadelphia was built. This round- 
about way was chosen because of the refusal of the New Jersey 
Railroad officials to allow the telegraph company to set up its 
poles along their line of railway. The short-sighted and witless 
reason was given that '' the telegraph would interfere with 
travel, through enabling persons to transact business by its 
means, instead of using the railroad." In no better way, per- 
haps, could be shown the great growth of the telegraph, railway 
and express interests of this country, than to narrate the fact 
that the first telegram from Philadelphia to New York was 
delivered at Somerville, the line being completed only that dis- 
tance. The message was then carried to the metropolis by the 
Elizabethtown and Somerville Railroad in a carpet-bag ; which 
carpet-bag, or rather its contents, represented the entire daily 
business of the Hope Express company, which afterward grew 
into an important corporation and was eventually consolidated 
with the Adams company. 

Picture to yourself a traveller of 1752 occupying six days — 
one hundred and forty-four hours — in traversing the distance 
between New York and Philadelphia. Imagine for a moment 
the discomforts and actual pains of such a journey during the 
winter months. Huddled on a crowded sloop for from twelve to 
forty-eight hours, fighting icy head tides, beating against winds, 
chill, drear and contrary, eating cold snacks supplied by your- 
self-^even '■'■ a fine cabin fitted up with a tea table " could hardly 
have palliated the miseries of such a voyage. In October, 1723, 
Benjamin Franklin, when making his first visit to Philadelphia, 
was thirty hours on his passage from New York to Amboy. His 
sloop was nearly lost in a squall, and one of the passengers fall- 
ing overboard narrowly escaped being drowned. Over fifty 
years later a traveller tells of being twenty hours in sailing six- 



Stage-Wagons of the Olden Time. 231 

teen miles on the Delaware in a sloop, while on a journey from 
New York to Philadephia. The same traveller was nearly ship- 
wrecked in New York bay, and lost some of his baggage at 
Araboy. On reaching Amboy passengers were lodged in uncom- 
fortable taverns ; they slept on straw-filled ticks, usually with 
two or three bed-fellows, and with but little choice as to com- 
pany. The passage overland to the Delaware was none the less 
disagreeable. The stages were ordinary Jersey wagons without 
springs, with white canvass covers stretched over hoops, those at 
the front and rear being very high, which gave somewhat of a 
picturesque appearance to the rude vehicle. The wheels 
revolved on primitive boxes, kept grgased by a frequent applica- 
tion of tar that was carried in a bucket suspended under the 
wagon body. Clumsy linchpins were supposed to secure the 
wheels, but they had a fashion, with but slight provocation, of 
hopping out, and letting the axle down with a thud in the mud, 
sending the passengers sprawling on the straw-covered floor of 
the stage. 

The roads were in a wretched condition with alternating 
stumps and holes. The rivers and streams had to be forded, 
and after heavy rains long delays were incurred while await- 
ing the subsiding of the waters. The men travellers were 
expected to partly work their passages by walking up the 
steep rises, and by putting their shoulders to the wheel when the 
steaming horses were stalled in a slough. But this outside work 
was not much worse than being jolted on the hard seats within, 
while the lumbering vehicle lurched and strained over the uneven 
roads, or staggered across corduroyed swamps, giving the pas- 
sengers very much the feeling of having had their backbones 
driven up into their skulls. It was many years before there 
were any decent roads in New Jersey. Between 1765 and 
1768 numerous unsuccessful efforts were made to float a lottery 
for raising money to improve the highways across the province. 
Governor Franklin, in an address to the assembly in 1768, thus 
refers to their condition : " Even those which lie between the 
two principal trading cities in North America are seldom pass- 
able without danger or difficulty." 

When one remembers that the railroad now accomplishes in 
one day the work of several weeks of the last century, no better 



232 The Story of an Old Farm. 

illustration can be given of the advance made by science in all 
that adds to the comfort and enjoyment of mankind, and to the 
diffusion of general intelligence. Beyond almost all the other 
improvements of this great age stands its progress made in loco- 
motion. As Johannes smoked his pipe in the taproom of Ayres' 
tavern on the evening of his arrival at Amboy, and listened to 
the traveller's tales of hardships by land and water, how incredu- 
lous he would have been had be been told that his posterity would 
fly between New York and Philadelphia in a less number of 
minutes than it took hours for Ayres' customers to traverse that 
distance ; that in 1889 America would be bound and interlaced 
with over one hundred and fifty thousand miles of iron and steel 
roads constructed at an average cost of over sixty thousand dol- 
lars per mile, and on which carriages would roll without visible 
means of locomotion, attaining a velocity at times of a mile in forty- 
five seconds. Still more absurd would behave considered the state- 
ment that in A. D. 1889, no more time would be consumed in 
crossing the then unexplored continent, from the Atlantic to the 
Pacific — 3,322 miles — than was in his day occupied in passing 
over the comparatively short distance lying between the Hudson 
and the Delaware ; that in the place of clumsy sloops and spring- 
less wagons, there would be luxurious coaches and mammoth 
steamboats ; that passengers, instead of suffering extraordinary 
fatigues, would stroll about elegantly appointed saloons, recline 
on softly cushioned chairs, or sleep on comfortable couches, 
while being whirled at from twenty-five to sixty miles an hour 
over thousands of miles of thickly populated country. 

We will leave Johannes to make his way back alone to Bed- 
minster. In the next chapter he will claim our attention while 
in conflict with rugged nature ; while combating and subduing 
his timbered hillsides, and reducing them to productive acres. 




CHAPTER XVII. 

Clearing the Bedminster Land — Life on the " Old Farm^^ 
from 1752 to 1763. 

Intelligent industry will overcome many difficulties. This 
faculty stood our ancestor in good part when he set about clear- 
ing the Bedminster farm, and to a great extent its possession 
can be ascribed to his nationality. The Germans in the prov- 
ince, generally, being a quiet industrious folk made themselves 
most valuable citizens. They were plodding, intent on their 
own business, attentive to the duties of religion, but were inter- 
ested, perhaps, too little in politics. McMaster writes that 
wherever a German farmer lived were to be found industry, 
order and thrift. Their buildings, fences, thoroughly-tilled fields 
and nurtured orchards were in marked contrast to the lands and 
improvements of their more careless English and Scotch neigh- 
bors. Other writers on the condition of the American colonies 
in the last century speak of the simple and primitive manners 
and frugal, industrious habits of the Germans, which, together 
with their contented spirits and honest dealings, made them 
valued acquisitions to the communities and most suitable infu- 
sions among the inhabitants of the provinces. 

Well ! Johannes and his sons are now fairly at work on the 
" Old Farm," and we must proceed with the telling of its story. 
He, like other early settlers, is occupied in making history ; not 
in the sense of the brilliant achievements of heroes ; his a 
more humble mission — to subdue a wilderness and civilize a 
community, to make smooth the way of future generations, and 
to secure for his posterity a comfortable and complete homestead. 
It took time to transform his heavily-wooded lands into arable 
fields ; meanwhile many privations had to be endured, and that 
labor which conquers all things vigoi'ously and assiduously 
prosecuted. 



234 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

In clearing New Jersey lands in colonial times the settler 
l)egan by felling the smaller trees and cutting off the stronger 
tranches of the greater ones. Next, the oaks, hickories and 
other large trees were attacked. Well girdled by the axe, 
these were left to stand until the following year, by which time, 
having been robbed of their sap, they were dead and ready for 
the burning. Encircling fires at the base of their trunks were 
ignited ; the trees fell, and by midsimimer the sun began to 
operate on land that, being formed almost entirely of rotten vege- 
tation, was rank with productiveness. Instead of rooting up the 
trees, many of the farmers after burning the stumps let them 
stand and decay. It gave the newly-cleared land a very ugly 
appearance, but in four or five years the stumps would have so 
rotted that they could be beaten to pieces and ploughed under. 
By July of the second year the ground was ready for a crop, 
which was generally buckwheat. When harvested in the 
autumn the land was ploughed, and sown with rye. Often, 
owing to the richness of the soil from the long drinking of the 
juices of decaying vegetation, the first year's crop all grew to 
straw, and it was not uncommon for several seasons to go by 
before the ground had been sufficiently toned by cultivation to 
produce good yields of wheat. 

Agriculture was but imperfectly undei'stood by the new set- 
tlers, and no knowledge seems to have been had of the value of 
the rotation of crops. Instances are given where new lands - 
produced rye for ten years, and then for ten successive harvests 
yielded wheat. The virgin soil, having been fertilized by nature 
for centuries, was for several decades prolific, but in time became 
exliausted, and the crops correspondingly poor. Farmers who 
had wasted the early strength of their fields were slow in appre- 
ciating the value of a plentiful use of lime and manure, and it 
was not until after the Revolution that impoverished lands began 
to be properly nourished and crops again to be abundant. It is 
said that the first Somerset farmer, who gave heart to exhausted 
land by the use of lime as a fertilizer, was Doctor John Reeve, who 
sent all the way to a quarry on the Delaware for the stone. In 
addition to profitably working a large farm near Rocky Hill, he 
was a physician in good practice. Old residents of the county 
remember him as a tall man of a majestic presence, and as a 



Farming Implements of the Last Century. 235 

graceful and fearless rider. His professional journeys were 
always made in the saddle, and as nearly as possible in an air 
line ; scorning such ordinary means of communication as high- 
ways and byways he rode bravely across the country, taking the 
fences as if following a pack of hounds at full cry. Although 
Bedminster township had abundant limestone within its borders, 
none was burned till 1794, and it was 1830 before Peapack lime 
came into general use. In the last century natural meadows sup- 
plied all the grass and grain for live-stock ; it was in the year 
1800 that Jacques Voorhees introduced clover-seed into Somer- 
set county ; the growing of grass on uplands inaugurated a new 
era in farming and great benefits resulted to husbandmen and 
the country. 

To one accustomed to the improved appliances that aid and 
abet the agriculturist of this age, the tools and implements that 
Johannes had at his command would seem illy contrived for till- 
ing the soil. The ploughs throughout the country at this time 
were rude and ineffective and mostly home-made. They were 
clumsily constructed of wood, the mould-board being fashioned 
from a block which had a winding grain approximating to the 
curve required. Thomas Jefferson is said to have first suggested 
the proper shape and proportion of this part of a plough. It was 
1776 before a wrought-iron ploughshare, some bolts, and a clevis 
were introduced, and the mould-boards after that time were 
often plated with strips of iron made from hammered horseshoes. 
Our state has the honor of being the first to have used cast-iron • 
ploughs, they being the invention of a New Jersey farmer named 
Newbold. Their introduction was not general until the year 
1797, the people being prejudiced against their use, and it is 
said that they claimed cast-iron poisoned the soil and ruined the 
crop. Our forefather sowed his seed by hand, and when harvest 
time came, no cradler with glittering knife swung his graceful 
way through the golden grain, marking the field with lines of 
even swath. Rye, wheat and buckwheat were cut with a 
sickle, but oats, like grass, fell under the scythe. The sickles 
used were long and narrow, their sharp edges having close 
teeth on the inner side. This manner of harvesting con- 
tinued until after the Revolution, when farmers were delighted 
by the appearance of the cradle, which improvement created as 



236 The Story of an Old Farm. 

much interest as has, in modern times, the introduction of the 
reaper. 

During the first years of life on the farm there was much to 
do besides clearing and tillage. Gun and worm fences were 
built — the great barns and mows were erected, and their long, 
sloping roofs thatched with the big rye straw grown on the 
strong, new ground ; orchards were set out, and below the hill 
the water power was improved, and the meadow facing Peapack 
^- brook pierced with tan vats. A little above, the mill was 
planted ; on its oaken floor a huge wooden-cogged wheel slowly 
revolved, crushing the black and red oak bark. An early 
undertaking was that of making the old garden to the east of the 
house — a combined kitchen and flower garden, as was the 
fashion of the time ; in it was planted the still blooming bed of 
German lilies. Horticulture was then in its infancy, oi- more 
properly speaking, as the word is now used, unknown. Old- 
fashioned gardens contained in the way of flowers but little else 
than hollyhocks, snow-baUs, roses, lilacs, pinks, tulips, sun-flow- 
ers, morning-glories and a few other primitive blossoms. As for 
fruit, no grapes were to be had excepting the poor native fox 
variety ; and the improved kinds of peaches, pears, plums and 
melons, had not yet been introduced. Of pears as well as of 
apples there were plenty, but no knowledge being had of nursing 
and grafting, they did not attain anything approaching their 
present perfection and deliciousness. So with the small berries, 
they were in great abundance, though micultivated, growing 
wild in the fields and woods. 

The vegetables of that period were few in variety and poor in 
quality. Potatoes were a staple, as were in their season cab- 
bages, beans and Indian corn ; but tomatoes, cauliflower, Mercer 
potatoes, okra, lettuce, SAveet corn, egg-plant and rhubai'b had 
not yet been heard of. It wiU thus be seen that " living" at the 
" Old Stone House " in the olden days was much simpler than 
those of us found it who were so fortunate as to gather about its 
well-spread board in the generation just passed. Johannes' table 
was well supplied with ham, bacon and smoked meats. Tradi- 
* tions smack their lips over the deliciousness of the tender juicy 

hams, that hung in rows from the ceiling timbers in the cool 
cellar. Their rich and nutty flavor was gained from being cured 



Colonial Farm Diet. 237 

in the fragrant smoke of burning hickory and oak, together with 
the fact of their having been carved from young pigs that had 
roamed the forest, fattening on acorns, hickory nuts and aromatic 
herbage. Occasionally fresh meat was had, as it was the cus- 
tom of farmers when they slaughtered a " critter " to distribute 
joints and pieces among their neighbors for miles around, relying 
for pay upon a return courtesy. The family had not yet out- 
grown its love for sauerkraut, as is shown by the writer's having 
the antique mortar — cut out of a solid block of wood — and pestle, 
which were used in the preparation of this compound, so dear to 
the German palate. A dish that garnished every meal was 
" kohl-salat," or cabbage salad. The Dutch called it '^ kohl- 
slaa," and from these two old country terms have come the 
degenerate word " coldslaw." Our yoeman's table, while ignor- 
ant of modem prepared dishes disguised with strange sauces, 
was abundently beset with solid substantial food : poultry, eggs, 
cheese and such farm diet there was, of course ; hot breads were 
in vogue ; short cakes, made with buttermilk and baked on a 
griddle, were in daily demand, and pies, doughnuts and olekokes, 
were features even of the morning meal. Soupaan — well salted 
Indian mush, eaten with milk and molasses — was the standard 
Sunday supper, though occasionally a raised biscuit, called 
^weibak, or twice baked, took the place of mush ; this biscuit 
was made in large quantities, bushels at a time, and then dried 
in the oven until as hard as a rock ; in a bowl of rich milk it 
made a toothsome dish, — to the truth of which more than one 
of Mariah Katrina's descendants can bear witness. 

As for beverages, a great favorite at that time was madeira, 
though except on festive occasions it was rarely found save on 
the tables of the rich. Farmers were content with hard cider, 
beer and Jamaica rum. The latter was almost the entire tipple 
of the poor throughout the colonies, except in the East, where 
immense quantities of molasses were annually converted into New 
England rum. A hot drink common at that time was soured 
beer simmered over the fire with crusts of brown bread, and 
sweetened with molasses. Another decoction, or concoction, of 
which the Germans of New Jersey were fond, was the extraor- 
dinary combination of chocolate and links of sausages, boiled in 
a kettle, served in a bowl, and eaten together with a spoon ; a 



238 The Story of an Old Farm. 

feast of which I am sure but few of my readers would care to 
partake. It is said that when tea was first introduced in New 
Jersey its manner of use was for some time unknown. The 
people in their ignorance boiled it well, throwing away the 
liquor ; the herb was then dished, buttered, and eaten as greens. 

For sweetening purposes molasses and maple sugar were com- 
monly used, as at that time brown or "store sugar" was yet con- 
sidered a luxury. The story is current that the introduction of 
white sugar in the Moelich family was by Johannes' daughter, 
Veronica Gerdrutta, «orae years later, on the occasion of a social 
tea-drinking. It was then both a curiosity and a treat among 
farmers, and especially to the Germans, who were a very 
economical folk. Fanny's husband, old Jacob Kline, not having 
been informed of the surprise in store for the guests, on 
sitting down at the table used the sugar as salt, suppos- 
ing it to be such. This so annoyed his wife that she cried 
out somewhat angrily in German, " you dumb Irishman, you 
never will know anything !" In calling her husband an Irish- 
man, the good wife poured upon his head the full vials of her 
contemptuous vocabulary. Among the colonists of Pennsylvania 
and New Jersey there were representatives of many nationali- 
ties, with widely dissimilar natures, but fortunately the unifying 
conditions were sufficient to ultimately blend their discordant 
elements. Yet, for a number of years the Irish and Germans 
were mutually repugnant, and each held the other in 
very low estimation ; consequently " Irish " and " Dutch " 
were bandied between the thi'ifty Germans and the sons of the 
Emerald Isle as epithets of contempt. In a letter from the elder 
Muhlenberg to the fathers of Zion church in 1772, the Patriarch 
complains that his conduct in a certain financial transaction had 
been misconstrued, and goes on to say : " You must have 
peculiar thoughts of me, as if 1 tried to cheat you out of some- 
thing or desired to play Irish tricks on you." 

Building barns, making gardens, and raising crops, are fair- 
weather work. There was much that could be done on the "■ Old 
Farm " in tempest as well as in sunshine. On stormy days and 
during the long winter evenings, Johannes and his sons were 
occupied with labor that woiUd now be done at wheelwright shops, 
factories and forges ; but sloops of all kinds were then few, and at 



QuiLTiNGS, , Frolics, and Donation-Visits. 239 

remote distances. Our forefathers cobbled their own shoes, 
repaired their own harness, and at extemporized carpenter and 
blacksmith shops made much of the household furniture and 
many of the farm and kitchen utensils. The Baroness Riedesel, 
the companion in misfortune of her husband, the Hessian Gen- 
eral who was captured witk Burgoyne, made and published 
many notes on the American army ; among them, one as follows : 
"Their generals who accompanied us were some of them shoe- 
makers, and on the days we halted made boots for our officers 
or even mended the shoes of our men." The Baroness was in 
error : they were not shoemakers, but the custom of colonial 
times was for the men to know all about the working of leather, 
they being able to make their own harness, saddles and shoes, 
just as it was for the women to spin and .weave ; doubtless these 
American officers in sore need of money were glad to exchange 
this knowledge and service for German and English coin. 

There were few or no luxuries in the olden time that would be 
recognized as such now ; the industries of the families were of the 
most complete character, as within each homestead was pro- 
duced, to a large extent, the necessities of its members. In 
farming communities, upon the women of the household devolved 
not only the duties of cooking, washing, milking, and dairy work, 
as at present ; in addition, they made their own garments and 
many of those of the men; they spun their own yarn, wove the 
family linen and woollen goods, smoked and cured meats, dipped 
tallow candles, brewed beer, and made soap. Their pleasures 
were limited, being confined principally to quilting frolics, apple 
paring bees, and husking and killing frolics. The latter were 
when the men met at each other's houses to do the autumn hog- 
killing, the women coming in the late afternoon to join them at 
supper, and have a dance in the evening. The " wood frolic " 
was also an institution which brought together most of the 
people of the congregations annually at the parsonages. While 
the men occupied themselves during the day hauling the minis- 
ter's yearly supply of wood, the wives and daughters came in the 
late afternoon and prepared a bountiful supper, to which the 
tired wood-haulers doubtless brought excellent appetites. The 
spinning-visit and the donation-visit were both made occasions 
for festivities. At the former it was the women who spent the 



240 The Story of an Old Farm. 

the day in work, the men coming at supper-time to contribute to 
the pleasures of the evening. 

Fielding writes that "• bare walls make gadding housewives." 
Could he have visited the "living-room" of the "Old Stone 
House " he would not have expressed this sentiment without 
noting an exception. It had bare walls, it is true, but Mariah 
Katrina was no gadding housewife : 

She was a woman of a stirring life, 
Whose heart was in her house ; two wheels she had, 
Of antique form ; — this large for spinning wool, — 
That small for flax ; and if one wheel had rest, 
It was because the other was at work. 

In many of the customs and courtesies of life she was doubt- 
less rude and mipolished. A helpmate to her husband, she did 
not disdain to aid him in the field. While occupied with house- 
hold duties her dress, and that of her daughters, was coarse 
homespun ; and often in the summer, to make her many busy 
steps in the farm-kitchen the lighter, she discarded shoes. But 
for all that, her posterity have no cause for being ashamed of 
this industrious German matron ; she was the mother of vigorous 
children, who developed into men and women useful and beloved. 
They, in their turn, transmitted to their descendants capacities 
for leading worthy and profitable lives. 

The "living-room," or farm-kitchen, was Mariah Katrina's 
kingdom, as it has been for all the housewives of the " Old 
Stone House" from that time down. It served for many pur- 
poses, and it was there that all the home life centred. With 
the exception of what was baked in the Dutch oven in the outer- 
kitchen, the cooking was done before or in the cavernous fire- 
place, around which were hung warming-pans, flat-irons, skil- 
lets, teapots and other necessaries, while from the " chimbley's" 
capacious throat depended cranes, hooks, pots, trammels and 
smokcjacks. This was even before the time, in farmers' families, 
of tin roasting-jacks ; turkeys used to be suspended by twine 
before the fire, and kept revolving, while the basting gravy 
dripped to a pan below. The domestic conveniences of that age 
did not include closets ; household articles were distributed about 
the walls of this farm-kitchen, hung on cop-stocks — wooden 
pegs, driven into the beams of the low-studded ceiling. On the 



A View of the Farm-Kitchen. 241 

dresser were rows of polished pewter platters and vessels, stand- 
ing cheek by jowl with well-scoured wooden trenchers, while 
laid away on the shelves of the great walnut press were piles of 
the family's coarse linen. In the corner stood two small wooden 
mortars, in which were pounded and powdered the mustard and 
coffee ; and on a convenient shelf were placed the lights for this 
world and the next, — a round iron tinder-box with its attendant 
flint and steel, and the huge family Bible, its pages black with 
qiiaint German characters. Pewter and copper were the mat- 
erials from which many of the drinking vessels and utensils were 
made, china and glass being in but little use. The precious 
metals were not common, except among the very rich, although 
all well-to-do farmers carried a silver watch and snuif-box, the 
latter being in frequent requisition. Tobacco was smoked in 
pipes, of which Johannes had brought a good supply from the 
old country ; segars were unknown in the " Old Stone House," 
indeed, throughout the colony in that century they were rarely 
seen outside of the large cities. 

Much of the space of the chambers in this Bedminster dwelling 
was occupied by mammoth " four-posters," stuffed with thick 
feather-beds that were covered by many-colored quilts and 
counterpanes of calico, durant and calamanco — whatever the last 
two may have been. Testers of cloth and curtains of chintz 
hung from above, while vallances of dimity reached to the floor. 
Much of the bedroom furniture was heavy, cumbersome and 
home-made, red cedar being the favorite wood, as it was consid- 
ered vermin proof and indestructible. The upper rooms, like the 
one below, then as now, were destitute of closets. People are 
not apt to feel the need of what they have never possessed ; 
otherwise we might suppose that Mariah Katrina and her 
daughters were much inconvenienced for the want of closet 
room. If you are curious to know in what kind of garments 
they were accustomed to array themselves, we may, in fancy, 
mount the oaken staircase to the garret, and there behold the 
treasures of clothing, of which women in the olden time had a 
great profusion Hanging on pegs driven in the wall, and 
depending from lines stretched from the eaves, were shortgowns, 
overgowns, outer garments and petticoats. The number of the 
last would now seem excessive, but colonial women thought at 
16 



242 The Story of an Old Farm. 

least fifteen necessary, while the Germans and Dutch often had 
twice that number. They were generally of tow, flannel and 
linsey-woolsey, and the young women of a household spent much 
of their girlhood in laying in a stock of petticoats for matronly 
uses. The shortgowns were of kersey, calamanco and homespun, 
but the frocks and outer garments were made of gay fabrics, the 
names of some of which are now obsolete ; beside satins, silks and 
velvets, there were in use taffety, beaver, French tabby, milinet, 
moreen, groset, Holland linen, bombazine, and " boughten 
calico." 

The men of that time, even in farming communities, were not 
insensible to the picturesqueness of variety and color in their 
garb. For daily wear, buckskin, leather, homespun and worsted 
fabrics were common, but on Sundays and on gala occasions 
prosperous yeomen were often clad in white, blue and crimson 
broadcloth coats, with short-clothes of plush, stockinet, yellow 
nankin, and even velvet. 

In the living-room, or farm-kitchen, the meals were eaten, 
friends were entertained, and the spinning done ; while just 
beyond the door, in the cellar on the same level, stood the clumsy 
loom, upon which the women banged away at odd times in mak- 
ing linen cloths and woollen goods for the family clothing. Flax 
was to Johannes a most important crop ; its treatment was 
largely within the province of the women of his household, from 
the pulling in the fields to the making, dressing, hatcheling, and 
spinning. This was before the days of cotton, and flax had 
many uses ; in addition to being prepared for the loom, mats and 
cushions were made from the coarse " hock-tow," and the rope, 
or finer tow, was twisted by the hands into long strands of yarn, 
from which were manufactured the farm cords and ropes. Deli- 
cate girls would seem to have had no place in the social economy 
of colonial farm families. They must needs have had strong 
arms and stout hips to have been able to lug the big iron kettles, 
or to have hung them on the great swinging crane of the yawn- 
ing fireplace. Strength was also necessary to handle the large 
sticks of hickory that kept the pot a-boiling, or the vast oven 
heated to just the point necessary for properly browning the 
batches of rye and wheaten loaves, the big pans of beans, and 
the cakes, puddings, and thick pies. Washing-day must have 



Washing-Day at the Old Stone House. 243 

been a sore affliction to the women-folk of the "Old Farm.'' 
When Monday came a roaring fire was built alongside the wash- 
house — on the bank of the brook — over which was suspended an 
iron pot in which the clothes were boiled. Washing machines 
and wringers were not — and even their predecessors, the corru- 
gated washboard and washtub, were unknown. The stream fur- 
nished a generous tub, and stout arms did the wringing. When 
the dirt and grime had been loosened by boiling the coarse 
clothing was put in the pounding barrel, and well thumped 
with a wooden pounder until the dirt was supposed to be elimi- 
nated. A rude washing machine — but it is said to have done 
effective service, though the fine fabrics of our day would find 
such rough handling rather severe ; not only the dirt, but the 
texture would be eliminated. 

The years roll on ! All this time the three hundred and 
sixty-seven acres of wild lands are gradually developing into a 
fine farm. Changes, too, are taking place in the family in which 
we are so much interested. Aaron, the first born, has brought 
home a wife — Charlotte Miller. Who were her parents our 
investigations do not show, nor are we any the wiser as to the 
date of the marriage ; it was probably about the year 1757, 
as their first child, John — the future Revolutionary soldier — was 
born on the thirty-first of July, 1758. If our surmise is correct, 
this would make the mother twenty-three years old at the 
time of her marriage, as she was born on the foui'teenth of May, 
1734. To man Heaven gives its best gift in a good wife ; and 
80 was Aaron blessed in Charlotte. Though we are ignorant of 
her parentage, she was evidently the daughter of a good mother, 
for of such are the best wives made. For over forty years she 
added to the comfort and happiness of her husband and children, 
and lived in the " Old Stone House " the life of Solomon's 
virtuous woman, for " the heart of her husband safely trusted in 
her, and she did him good, and not evil, all her days." 

There has not been preserved to us an account of Aaron's 
marriage. It is to be regretted ; — as in the olden time there 
were many quaint customs and observances attendant upon 
weddings. They were not confined to the ceremony ; the occa- 
sion of bringing the wife home — called the infare — was one of 
great festivity, often prolongeld for several days, the kinsfolk and 



244 The Story of an Old Farm. 

neighbors being bidden from far and near. The laws regarding 
marriages were then exceedingly strict. It was necessary 
for the contracting parties to have the bans published three 
times, or else procure from the governor of the province a license, 
which would not be gi'anted unless the bridegroom appeared in 
person before the chief magistrate, accompanied by two promi- 
nent citizens. These latter were obliged to testify that they 
knew of no lawful obstacles to the marriage ; and to give a bond 
that they would be answerable for any damages that might arise 
because of any previous promise of marriage having been made, 
or for any complaints against the contracting parties by their 
relatives, guardians, or masters. All of the above preliminaries 
having been complied with, the governor delivered the license 
upon the receipt of twenty-five shillings currency, which fees 
materially added to the amount of his annual income. 

There were other peculiar marriage laws in the province. 
One relating to widows was particularly diverting. This was 
before the day of acts protecting the rights of a married woman. 
She could hold no property individually, and on the death of her 
husband had not legal ownership of her own wearing-apparel 
unless bequeathed to her ; otherwise the clothes on her back 
belonged to the estate of her husband. If that estate proved 
insolvent, and the widow remarried, care had to be taken that 
the perplexities of her first husband's affairs did not attach to 
those of the second. To do this it was necessary for her to be 
married in nothing but her shift, the giving up of her clothes to 
the creditors of her deceased husband releasing her from further 
claims. After the ceremony she was at once arrayed in clothing 
presented by the new husband. Professor Kalm, the Swedish 
traveller, quotes the following account as having been read in 
1749 in the " Pennsylvania Gazette ;" the circumstances having 
occurred in New Jersey : 

A woman went witli no other dress than her sliift out of the house of her 
deceased husband to that of her bridegroom, who met her half way with fine 
new clothes, and said before all who were present that he lent them to his bride ; 
and put them on with his own hands. It seems he said that he lent the clothes 
lest if he said he gave them the creditors of the first husband should come and 
take them from her, pretending that she was looked upon as the relict of her 
first husband, before she was married to the second. 

Yes ! the procession of the generations has commenced. The 



The Household in 1760. 245 

'^ Old Stone House " is now a home in the truest sense, for its 
rooms have echoed to the cry of a baby ; within its walls for the 
first time a mother has looked with eyes of love into those of her 
infant — the sweetest, tenderest, happiest look that can come from 
a woman. Johannes and Mariah now mount to a higher plane 
in the family circle. Clothed in the honor and dignity of their 
advancing years, they sit on either side of the fireplace with 
grandchildren at their knees. For the first little one did not 
remain king ; others followed to claim their share of the house- 
hold affections — Catharine, born the fifteenth of July, 1761, and 
Daniel, the writer's grandfather, born on the twenty-eighth of 
October, 1763. The house can now be said to be furnished ; for 
it is Southey, I think, who declares that none can be called com- 
pletely so until there is a kitten on the hearth, and a child of at 
least three years playing about its chambers. 

It is now many years since Johannes, his wife, and their little 
flock passed through the Bach-gate of the ancient city of Ben- 
dorf, and turned their steps westward. He was still a young 
man then, but now his hair and that of his dame is thin and rap- 
idly frosting. As he looks back there can be no call for regret 
at his having come to America. Surveying his comfortable 
homestead and contented household, he must appreciate how 
signally he has been prospered. Successful in his avocations, 
honored by his brethren of the church, and loved by his children, 
for what more could he have asked *? Death has not crossed his 
threshold ; his family is intact though not all together. Aaron, 
his prop and stay, is to succeed him on the farm and in the tan- 
nery ; Fanny, married to prosperous Jacob Kline, is already the 
happy mother of several children. Another of the brood being 
old enough to fly, has taken wing and left the family nest ; for 
Andrew, the second son, having found a wife, has made his way 
into Sussex county. The two other boys and the daughter 
Maria, though men and women grown, are still at home, con- 
tributing their share to the family toil and joy. 

The weather-vane faces the direction of the wind ! — so the 
faithful German heart ever veers toward fatherland. As our 
immigrant-ancestor, with his gray-haired wife, slowly floats down 
the river of life toward the open sea of eternity, his barque 
freighted with pious hopes, he still remembers the village of 



246 The Stoky of an Old Farm. 

gray antiquity on the banks of the far-distant Rhine. Though 
he has sworn honest fealty to another government, after having 
been forced into expatriation by the unjust laws of his own, he 
has not forgotten that east of the Alantic ocean there lies a fair 
country, to which the invisible links of aflfection still chain his 
memory. Through all the years of his American life he has con- 
tinued in correspondence with relatives and friends in Germany. 
Among the letters preserved is one from his wife's brother, the 
burgomaster of Hochstenbach, written in 1760, with which I 
will close this chapter. It tells the same story, as have the 
others, of the miseries of continental warfare. It seems a stately, 
foruial letter to have been written to a sister who was over 
three thousand miles away, and from whom the writer had been 
separated for a quarter of a centuiy. 

Hochstenbach, 20 April, 1760. 

Much beloved brother-in-law and dear sister : Your lionored letter of 
September 28th, 1759, we have duly received on the 9th of January, 1760, and 
noticed to our great joy that you and your good children are in good health, on 
behalf of which we heartily congratulate you. 

As regards ourselves we have, so far. Thanks to our Lord, also been enjoying 
good health. Our country lias been marched over for several years by French 
Troops, exacting from ns, even last year yet, strong forages to be delivered in 
Bendorf and Glabach, and in the winter and last spring in Limburg, so that the 
poorer class of subjects keep scarcely enough for his own use ; May the Almighty 
soon give us peace again. 

From Bendorf I have to report that cousin Job. Geo. Kirberger died a few 
years ago, leaving six children behind. Cousin Hager and his lady and their 
children are well. In the mean time we wish you our Lord's Mercy, and that he 
may bless you all. With our best salutations, I remain 

Your sincere brother and brother-in-law, 

H. Kirberger. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

The Death of Johannes and Mariah in 1763 — Changes in the 
Township — The Dutch Congregations of the Raritan Valley 
— The Building of Bedminster Church. 

And now Johannes' days are on the wane. Their meridian 
has long since passed, and the short afternoon having merged 
into the sober evening of life, he is reaping the comforts and 
consolations resulting from the active and useful employments of 
youth and middle age. Like a traveller who at the close of day 
has reached a high hill whose summit is bathed in the hues of 
the setting sun, he is able to look back with satisfaction over 
the pleasant country that has been traversed. Our pilgrim has 
attained that quiet dreamy hour of life, '^ between the lights," 
when his ripened years bring the tranquil enjoyments of repose 
and retrospection. Relieved from labor by the children who 
have learned habits of industry by his example, they now repay 
him for many days of anxious and devoted care. 

Sooner or later all things must pass away. The undaunted 
one — the messenger of death — inevitably draws near. Johannes 
must leave his lands, his well-built house, his orchards and his 
woods, and take up his abode beyond that mysterious shade — 
that dim spectral mist which curtains time from eternity. There 
came a day, when the year 1763 was hastening to its close, on 
which Johannes' hour was come. The mellow October weeks 
had gone — the Indian summer passed — the golden-rod still stood 
thickly along the fences, but the many-colored asters which 
alone remained in the old garden were sprinkling their petals 
over its lonely beds. It was on the sixteenth day of that gloom- 
iest month of all the year, when the chill November rains were 
robbing the earth of its fruits and verdure and beating from the 



248 The Story of an Old Farm. 

branches of the trees their russet leaves, that our German 
ancestor folded his hands, and was at rest. Calm was his exit, 
for his end was peace. He was mourned in the "Old Stone 
House," but he found a companion awaiting him beyond the 
pearly gates, for his faithful old wife Mariah had died on the 
seventeenth day of October — old no longer, for we may believe 
with Mohamet that old women never reach heaven — they all 
grow young on the journey. 

Let us preserve the memory of these honest German people. 
In their dreamless sleep for over a century, they have lain side 
by side under the long grass of the Lutheran burying-ground at 
Pluckamin. Generations that followed in their footsteps have 
like them disappeared from the earth. But we, who yet linger 
amid scenes that were familiar to their eyes, may consider with 
gratitude and affection of our indebtedness to these simple Rhine 
folk and their fellow-pioneers. Their hands gx'ew hard in mak- 
ing smooth rugged paths on which we now walk with ease. Let 
their names be revered by their kindred and their honest hard- 
working lives noted and recorded. " They rest from their labors, 
and their works do follow them." These simple-minded men 
and women — the forefathers and foremothers of Bedminster — 
found this township a wilderness. By their virtue and their 
intelligent industry they left it planted with churches, schools 
and homesteads, and guarded by laws, social and legal, in wliich 
were laid the foundations of the happiness of future generations. 

Johannes is dead, and his first-born reigns in his stead. The 
father left behind him the name of a good man. He also left to 
succeed him a good son, well able to take up the work where it 
had been laid down, and quite equal to perform all the duties of 
life with the same honesty of purpose and simple earnestness of 
endeavor as had characterized the daily walk of the parent. With 
the progression of the story of the "Old Farm" there will be much 
to tell of the busy and useful life passed by Aaron on these ances- 
tral acres and in the community, before he ceased to labor, and 
at the rounded age of eighty-one, made way in his turn for the 
worthy son who succeeded him. As we shall have occasion to 
show, he was in every respect a man of affairs, and from the 
mass of his papers in my possession it is ev^ident that for the 
forty-five years he survived Johannes in the "Old Stone House " 



Changes in Bedminster. 249 

he played a no unimportant part in the drama of Bedminster 
life. 

Seed-time and harvest come and go ! Springtime and autumn 
slip by ! meanwhile the country roundabout has undergone 
great changes. Latent forces that have been lying buried for 
seons of time in these Bedminster hills and valleys, ready to res- 
pond to man's endeavor and desire, are now in active operation. 
The warm, palpitating sunlight heretofore arrested one hundred 
feet from the groimd by the foliage of the rounded tree-tops, now 
bathes with its genial heat broad open spaces, here and there 
throughout the township, where children play in gardens and 
orchards, and the lusty corn tosses its yellow tresses over well- 
tilled fields. The rude dwellings of the early inhabitants have 
undergone prosperous transformations, and during the eleven 
years that the '^ Old Stone House" has been standing, many 
industries have sprung into active existence. Across the brook X 
a grist and saw mill are in operation, and homesteads begin to 
mosaic the hills that roll away toward Peapack. In the direction of 
Lamington, farms are multiplying; and on the Axtell tract, 
below where are now the Lesser and Larger Cross Roads, human 
thrift has been busy, until patches of open and woodland alter- 
nate, and sunlight and shadow checker all that portion of the 
township. 

Lnmediately adjoining the " Old Farm" on the south, 
Jacobus Van Doren purchased of William Axtell, about the 
year 1760, two hundred and eighty-three acres of land, and 
erected a house where is now the residence of Cornelius M. 
Wyckoff. This land he sold in 1815 to Captain Joseph Nevius, 
who, some years later, conveyed that portion lying east of the 
Peapack road to Cornelius M. Wyckofi^, whose son — of the same 
name — is now in possession. The original house was taken 
down in 1820 to make room for the present Wyckoff dwelling; 
Jacobus Van Doren was the grandson of Jacobus Van Doorn^ 
who migrated from Long Island to Monmouth county about the 
year 1698. He was also the nephew of that Abraham Van 
Doren, who it is said was sheriff of Somerset county for twenty 
years, and whom we found in 1752 superintending the burning 
at Millstone of the negro slave murderer of Jacob Van Neste. 
Jacobus was the eldest of the seventeen children of Christian 



250 The Story of ax Old Farm. 

Van Doren and Alche Schenck, who settled on the Amwell road 
in Middlebush about 1723. In Domine Leydt's time Christian 
was an elder in the First Reformed Dutch church at New Bruns- 
wick, and Ralph Voorhees tells us in " Our Home" that it was 
his custom on Sunday mornings to ride to church, accompanied 
by his wife and ten children, all well mounted on separate horses. 
Methinks this cavalcade would serve a painter as an excellent 
subject for a colonial picture ; and that this peaceful Sabbath- 
day march of good-man Van Doren, with his household troop 
drawing rein in front of the old Dutch church, would present a 
scene quite equalling in interest those of the cavalry that often 
seem just ready to step out of a canvas of De Taille, or De 
Neuville. 

The memory of Mrs. Christian (Alche) Van Doren is revered 
as that of one of Somerset's mothers in Israel. She was the 
life-long friend of Jufvrouw Hardenbergh — of whom much more 
hereafter — and, though living six miles distant, was a constant 
attendant at church until her ninety-fifth year. When this 
remarkable old lady died she left three hundred and fifty-two 
living descendants, among whom were two hundred great-grand- 
children and six great-great-grandchildren. The size of families 
in those early days would seem to have been commensurate with 
the needs of population. Of her children, all but one lived to an 
old age, and raised families ; and one of her grandchildren, fol- 
lowing his grandparent's example, had seventeen children. The 
most of her twelve boys were called after the patriarchs, proph- 
ets and apostles, nor would she ever permit tiieir names to be 
shortened ; there were no Jakes, Abes, Ikes, Petes or Jacks in 
her household. Mrs. Van Doren had the happiness of seeing 
SiW. of her sons prominent in the Dutch church. Jacobus was 
active in sustaining the Bedminster church ; in an old salary 
subscription list, in my hands, his name frequently appears as 
well as that of his cousin Aaron who, together with the latter's 
brother John, settled about this time in Peapack, establishing an 
industry, known to this day as Van Doren's mills. Lewis A. 
Van Doren, their present owner, is the grandson of John. His 
father, William A. Van Doren, in about 1832 introduced and oper- 
ated the first threshing machine in Bedminster. It was a primitive 
affair requiring eight horses attached to a lever-power to do the 



Some of the Eakly Churches. 251 

work accomplished now by two. Notwithstanding its clumsiness 
it was considered a great improvement over former methods, as 
by it in one week as much grain was threshed as until then 
four men had been able to hammer and tread in two months 
with swingle-clubs and six horses. 

Joseph Nevius, to whom Jacobus Van Doren sold his land in 
1815, was a descendant of Johannes Nevius, who came to New 
Amsterdam from Solen in Westphalia early in the seventeenth 
century. His grandson Petrus was living at Flatbush in 1738, 
and later removed to Somerset county, and through him are the 
Raritan valley Neviuses descended. Joseph, before settling in 
Bedminster, had been the popular host of the Blackhorse 
tavern at Mendham in Morris county. His eldest daughter, 
Ann, married John Melick, grandson of Aaron, and lived for 
many years in the '' Old Stone House," dying at the age of 
seventy-six on the seventh of October, 1876. She was a woman 
of strong character and many virtues ; throughout her life she 
held a position in the community of more than usual influence, 
and enjoyed the respect and affection of all with whom she came 
in contact. Often called upon in time of need for counsel or 
help, her noble nature was ever as ready to condemn the wrong 
as to uphold the good and the true, and the memory of " Aunt 
Ann" is cherished, not only by her kindred, but by all with whom 
she was intimate, and especially by the poor, who were always 
her care. 

Previous to the year 1763, without doubt, the most important 
addition to this Bedminster neighborhood was the organization of 
the congregation of the Reformed Dutch church and the erection 
of its first church building. If not a majority, certainly a great 
number of the settlers of the township were of this religious per- 
suasion, and were connected with one of the Dutch congrega- 
tions of the Raritan valley. When the Presbyterians had 
erected their house of worship at Lamington, and the Lutherans 
had organized Zion and St. Paul's churches at New Germantown 
and Pluckamin, many as a matter of convenience joined those 
congregations, but most of the people still made their way south- 
ward each Sunday. The nearest houses of worship were the 
** Raritan Church" at Van V.eghten's bridge and the " Church of 
North Branch" at the village of Readington. Tlie first edifice 



252 Thk Story of an Old Farm. 

of the latter congregation was a log structure with a frame addi- 
tion, erected about 1717, that stood near the forks of the river, on 
the brow of the hill just east of the junction of the Readington 
and North Branch village highways. In 1738 a new building 
was erected near the site of the present edifice at Readington. 
The Raritan church — now the "First Reformed Church at Sonier- 
ville" — was erected, probably in 1721, on land donated by Michael 
Van Veghten, on the bluff facing the Raritan river about one 
quarter of a mile below the present bridge near Finderne rail- 
way station. Doctor Messier records that this congregation was 
in existence long before it had a church building, its meetings 
probably being held in some private house or bam. The first 
consistory entry is of the year 1699 when JohnT uyneson j vas 
installed elder and Pieter Van Neste, deacon by the lleverend 
Guillaume Bertholf. 

The name of this minister often appears among the early- 
records of the Dutch churches of Somerset, and he seems 
to have been an itinerant domine, having on his conscience 
the spiritual welfare of all the people of Holland descent 
in a wide area of countiy. He was sent to the Netherlands in 
1693 by the congregations of Hackensack and Aquackanonck 
that he might be ordained by the chassis of Amsterdam. Mr. 
Bertholf returned in the following year, the first qualified mini- 
ster of the Dutch Reformed persuasion in the province, and for 
fifteen years was the only pastor for all the country lying 
between Tappan in New York and the upper Raritan in New 
Jersey, including Tarrytown, Staten Island, Pompton, and Sec- 
ond River or Belleville. Until his death in 1724 he labored 
unremittingly to spread the field of usefidness of the Dutch 
church, and it is said that his mild and placid eloquence and 
gentle but deeply-religious nature diffused a holy savor of piety 
throughout all the communities that were so happy as to fall 
under his kindly influences. The two churches of Raritan and 
" North Branch" in the beginning of the last century were " col- 
legiate'' with the one at Three Mile Run; which before 1717 
divided and erected churches at Six Mile Run and at New 
Brunswick. 

Church buildings were primitive aff*airs in those days. 
The one at Six Mile Run was but a mere shell, with the 



Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghutsen. 253 

earth for a floor. Its worshippers were ignorant of pews and 
aisles, the only seats being those brought with them each Sun- 
day from home. These four congregations were without regular 
preaching ; occasionally they would be visited by Mr. Bertholf, 
or by some missionary deputed by him, when communion, bap- 
tism and other religious rites would be administered. It is fair 
to presume that services of some kind alternated in the different 
churches conducted by the congregation's lay preachers or '' fore 
readers." The title of the official, who served the Dutch con- 
gregations in this capacity, was voorlecser. His duty it was in 
the absence of the minister to read prayers and sermons, cate- 
chise the children, and to generally maintain public worship and 
nourish the seeds of piety. 

The four congregations, about the year 1717, joined in 
applying to the home church in Holland, for a permanent 
pastor. Two years later Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen 
was sent out to them by the ship King George, Captain 
Goelet. He preached his first sermon in Somerset county 
on the thirty-first of January, 1720. We learn from Sprague's 
" Annals of the American Pulpit" that he was the son of 
Johannes Henricus Frelinghuysen, pastor of the Dutch church 
at Lingen in East Friesland, now a portion of the kingdom of 
Hanover, where he was born about the year 1691. He married 
Eva, the daughter of Albert Terhune, a wealthy farmer of Flat- 
bush, Long Island, and had seven children. His five sons all 
entered the ministry of the Reformed Dutch church, and his two 
daughters married ministers in the same communion. Singular 
to relate not one of the domine's sons was living ten years after 
their father's death. Mr. Frelinghuysen did a great work in 
thoroughly establishing the Dutch church in Somerset. He is 
said to have been a ripe scholar in Latin, Greek and his own 
language, and Doctor Messier ranks him among the Blairs, Ten- 
nents, Mathers and other eminent clergymen of his age. White- 
field, Jonathan Edwards and Gilbert Tennent have left on rec- 
ord their appreciation of the labors and unceasing diligence of 
this Dutch Calvinistic minister, whereby the '^ wilderness was 
converted into the garden of the Lord." Domine Frelinghuysen 
lived at Three Mile Run, just west of New Brunswick, on a farm 
of two himdred acres, lately owned by E. Vantine Bronson. 



254 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Here he died about the year 1747, and was buried in the old 
Six Mile Run graveyard, now Elm Ridge cemetery. Before his 
death his duties, which extended over three hundred square 
miles of territory, had been increased by the organization in 
1727 of the congregation " op de MiUstotie" now known as 
Harlingen church. After Mr. Frelinghuysen's death, the con- 
gregations of New Brunswick and Six Mile Run withdrew from 
the others of the Raritan valley, and extended a call to the Rev- 
erend John Leydt. The remaining chui'ches invited Theodorus 
Jacobus Frelinghuysen's second son, John, to become their pastor. 
He was born in 1727, and preached his first sermon in the Rari- 
tan church in the summer of 1750 from the text, " Instead of 
thy fathers shall be thy children." He had just returned from 
Holland, where he had been to obtain from the classis of Amster- 
dam license to preach. He brought with him from the old coun- 
try a wife — Dinah Van Bergh — a woman of such virtue and 
piety that during her long life of fifty-six years in Somerset, it is 
said few ministers exercised more influence for good in that com- 
munity than did — as she was afterwards known — the " Jufvrouw 
Hardenbergh." A copy of John Frelinghuysen's call from the 
three consistories is preserved among the archives of the Somer- 
ville church ; after stipulating that he should preach the word of 
God in the Dutch language, faithfully exercise discipline upon 
offending church members, and generally perform the duties of 
a servant of Christ, " after the manner of our Reformed Low 
Dutch church, established at the Synod of Dordrecht, 1618, 
1619," it goes on to say : 

Now in order to be a little more definite, your Reverence will be required to 
preach, alternating, in each of the afore-mentioned churclies, and, when in 
healtli, twice on each Lord's Day, except in winter, and then only once, as the 
custom here is, and also upon the so-called Feast Days, as is customary in the 
Reformed Low Dutch churches. Also, your Reverence will be required to take 
charge of the catechizing of the youth, of the visitation of families and of the 
sick, as time and opportunity permit. 

To assure your Reverence that this is our sincere desire, we promise you, in the 
name of our churches, besides all love and esteem which belongs to a faithful 
servant of (.'hrist, to provide, tirst, for a yearly salary of one hundred and twenty- 
five pounds, current money at eight shillings an ounce; the half of which, col- 
lected by the elders and deacons, shall be paid each half year; and a suitable 
dwelling, with thirty acres of land. 

The house referred to in tlie call was erected in 1751, and can 



A Divinity Student's Wooing. 255 

still be seen as a portion of the residence of the late Joshua 
Doughty, on Somerset street in Somerville. It is constructed of 
bricks that the domine brought with him from Holland in the same 
vessel with his wife. John Frelinghuysen's pastorate lasted 
biit three years. While visiting relatives on Long Island he was 
taken alarmingly ill, and there died in September, 1854. Mrs. 
Frelinghuysen, who had accompanied him, returned home with 
the body of her husband in a boat so contracted and inconvenient 
that, as her biographer recounts, she was compelled, with a very 
great shock to her sensibilities, to step upon the coffin in passing 
to the shore. The children of this marriage were a son and a 
daughter. The former — Frederick — grew up to be eloquent at 
the bar, wise in the councils of the nation, and valiant in Revo- 
lutionary fields. Of all the five sons of Theodoris Jacobus, John 
was the only one who left descendants, and now for over one 
hundred and thirty years each successive generation of Freling- 
huysens has presented one or more illustrious sons to the state 
and country. 

At the time of this minister's death he had with him 
in his house of Holland bricks three young men as students. 
Among them was Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh, then but sixteen 
years old, who was preparing for the ministry. He was born at 
Rosendale, New York, being the great-grandson of Johannes 
Hardenbergh, who emigrated from Germany soon after 1650. 
His son, in connection with Robert Livingston, received a patent 
for all of Sullivan and a portion of Delaware county in New 
Yoi'k. On this ^' Hardenbergh patent,'^ this young divinity 
student was bom, his father, Colonel Johannes, having inherited 
a great portion Qf the estate. Young Hardenbergh must early 
have evinced muc'. talent and ability, as we find that John Fre- 
linghuysen's con^ -egations decided that as soon as ordained he 
should be their new minister. In the meantime Mr. Freling- 
huysen's widow had determined, after her short residence in 
America, to return with her two children to her parents in Hol- 
land. Within a few months preparations for the journey were 
completed, and the day fixed for leaving for New York, where 
she was to embark. But, meanwhile, propinquity, that god- 
father of so many marriages, had been doing its work on the 
susceptible heart of the young divinity student. Alarmed at the 



256 The Story of an Old Farm. 

prospect of the near departure of the object of his affections, he 
suddenly surprised the widow of less than a year with an offer of 
marriage. In her astonishment she is said to have cried out : 
"■ My child, what are you thinking about ! " Although not imme- 
diately, the young lover ultimately had no difficulty in convinc- 
ing her of just what he was thinking. Her sex asserted itself. 
The good Dutch lady could not withstand the temptation of a 
yoimg and ardent husband, so her effects were unpacked and the 
voyage to the old country abandoned. They were married, and 
she retired to the manorial homestead of her new husband's 
father, near Kingston, New York, where she awaited his 
majority and the completion of his studies. Hardenbergh was 
at this time not yet seventeen, while his wife was approaching 
thirty. 

In May, 1758, Mr. and Mrs. Hardenbergh were again occupy- 
ing John Frelinghuysen's brick house in Somerville, or as that 
whole section was then known, Raritan, and the young man of 
barely twenty-one installed as the pastor of the four united con- 
gregations of Raritan, North Branch, Millstone, and Neshanic. 
The last named, had been organized in 1752, and set off from 
the North Branch congregation, which had long before this 
abandoned its primitive house of worship, and built a new church 
three miles away at Readington. The ecclesiastical history of 
Somerset county will never be completely written without devot- 
ing many pages to the character and attainments of this virtuous 
woman — "Jufvrouw Hardenbergh." For the fifty years that 
she bore this honored name her deeply religious nature was^ 
alike a prop and stay to the faith of timid believers, and a com- 
fort and encouragement to profound theologians and the ablest 
occupants of the Reformed Dutch pidpits. Doctor Messier, in a 
tribute to the ministry of Mr. Hardenbergh, avers that a large 
share of the usefulness and success of this divine can be attrib- 
uted to the influence of his wife. Her father was an Amster- 
dam merchant, and a man of wealth and fashion. She was 
educated in a superior manner, and her tastes cultivated to a 
high degree ; but to her parents' great disappointment, at the 
early age of fourteen her religious impressions became so fixed 
as to cause her to find no pleasure in the allurements and amuse- 
ments of the society of the metropolis. It is said that on one 



Dinah Van Bergh's Journal. 257 

occasion, when forced by her father to attend a dancing school, 
she to his great anger hid behind the seats, and resolutely refused 
to partici}3ate in what she considered frivolous amusements. At 
another time — while she was yet a child — her parents were 
entertaining some friends, and the guests, as was not unusual at 
that period, were amusing themselves by playing cards for 
money. She did not hesitate to walk into the drawing-room 
and in severe tones solemnly warn her father and his friends 
against the danger of so vain and sinful a pleasure. 

Every incident in the daily life of this remarkable woman 
produced a religious influence, and it would seem that no exper- 
ience could be hers without resulting in an individual blessing. 
Throughout her life she had implicit confidence in special provi- 
dences, and many instances are related in which she claimed to 
have experienced undoubted proofs of direct answer to prayer. 
It was her constant habit to make affairs of either great or minor 
importance a matter of personal appeal to the Almighty. This 
religious habit was not the out-growth of years, or of ministerial 
associations, but a custom from her youth up. In the Sage 
library at New Brunswick is preserved a voluminous journal 
closely written in Dutch in a fine feminine hand, which, with 
much redundancy of expression and considerable repetition, nar- 
rates the operation of her mind under the " Divine guidance " 
for nine months during the year 1747. This, of course, was 
when she was living in Amsterdam and still a maiden. I cannot 
refrain from drawing a little upon this interesting diary to 
further illustrate the character of Dinah Van Bergh. It was 
written at the time when Louis XV. and Frederick the Grreat 
were pursuing their designs against Maria Theresa in the Neth- 
erlands, and when the French king, continuing his career of 
•success after Fontenoy, had mastered nearly all of Flanders. 
The ^' barbarous and vile treatment " of the Hollanders by the 
French greatly disturbed this young Dutch girl's repose of mind. 
She writes in her journal : — 

It stirs me up the more to protest against them at the Throne, to imprecate 
righteous vengeance on that Assyrian and oppressor. 

Although she faithfully plead that the Netherlands might be 

delivered from the French, she acknowledges : — 
17 



258 The Story of an Old Farm. 

I could iinvardlv approve of it and jiistifv God slunild He give us over to 
destruction, and bring in upon our land that boar of the wood — I mean France, 
that enemy of the heritage of God. 

During one week that this journal was in hand Zealand was 
threatened with an invasion by the French army, owing to the 
intense cold having converted the bays and rivers intx) ice 
bridges strong enough to permit the passage in safety of horses 
and artillery. On Sunday Dinah came to the rescue of her 
imperilled country. All day she prayed that the threatened 
affliction might be averted. Her diary records : — 

On Monday I was enabled to continue in filial supplications to God in Christ 
that if it might so be a change might occur in the weather ; and, oh, adorable 
Goodness! there was on Tuesday as powerful and delightful a thaw as was ever 
seen. Oh, how humble was I thus rendered before ra}' compassionate God, and 
what a lesson of confidence was I thereby taught! Our enemies had boasted that 
they would do something with which the whole of Europe would resound, now I 
was led to say, " Oh, Enemy, the daughter of Zion hath laughed thee to scorn, and 
shaken her head at thee ; for the Lord has strengthened the bars of our gates." 

On another occasion Zealand was threatened with a dreadfiU 
inundation owing to very high northerly winds having prevailed 
for several days. But Dinah dammed the flood with her prayers, 
which induced the Lord, as she recounts : — 

To moderate the calamity by giving us an east wind, and that for days in suc- 
cession, connected witli weather of a most delightful cliaracter. 

One day, being stricken with a fever in a friend's house, her 
life was despaired of. But on praying for recovery she informs 
us that an intimation was given that on a certain date — the six- 
teenth of September — convalescence would begin. She told her 
friend, and awaited with confidence the day. It came, and, 
though previously helpless, she arose and walked several times 
across the floor, and recovery was assured from that hour. The 
attendant physician, Avho was an unbeliever, had considered \\ei9 
death imminent ; he was so affected by this sudden restoration 
to health that it resulted in his conversion. The good woman 
always insisted that this visit to her friend was heaven-directed, 
in order that her miraculous healing might be the means of 
awakening the soul of this sceptical doctor. 

Her coming to America and both of her marriages were due, 
as she believed, to a special providence. When yomig John 
Frelinghuysen was in Holland seeking ordination, he pleaded in 



Dinah Van Bergh's Two Marriages. 259 

vain for Dinah Van Bergh to return with him as his wife. Soon 
after setting out on the home voyage, his vessel was disabled in 
a violent storm and forced to return to port. The young minis- 
ter renewed his suit, urging that the Ruler of storms clearly 
indicated by the disaster, and his consequent return, that the 
Divine pleasure was for her to yield to his desires. This time 
Dinah received intimations, and overcoming her scruples against 
leaving kindi-ed and native land, she braved the opposition of 
her parents and embarked for a wilderness beyond the seas as 
Mrs. Frelinghuysen. 

The story is told that during the passage the ship sprung 
a leak. After days of arduous labor at the pumps the captain 
abandoned all hope of saving the vessel, and so informed pas- 
sengers and crew. Dinah apparently had no fears of a watery 
grave. She retired to her cabin and submitted the case to her 
Heavenly Father. Having full confidence in the efficacy of her 
prayers, she then sat down and awaited with composure the 
result. Nor did she wait long — for almost immediately the 
waters ceased rushing into the hold — the pumps again did their 
work — the ship was saved. Upon an examination being made, 
it was found that a swordfish had miraculously become wedged 
in the open seam of the bottom of the vessel, and thus effectu- 
ally closed the leak. 

The Reverend William Demarest, in a manuscript sketch of 
the life of Dinah Van Bergh, recites that her second marriage 
was also clearly the result of an intimation from on High. It 
appears that the first occasion of Mr. Hardenbergh's expressing 
his love for Mrs. Frelinghuysen was just before the day set for 
the departure for Holland. With her two children she was vis- 
iting for the last time a favorite place on the meadows between 
the house and the river, where she had been accustomed often to 
resort with her husband. While standing there, overwhelmed by 
her emotions, and '^ after," as her biographer Avrites, '^ having, 
it may be, just engaged in prayer," her attention was drawn to 
the approaching figure of young Hardenbergh. She received 
him with surprise and expressed displeasure at his thus intrud- 
ing upon her solitude. He excused himself by broaching the 
subject of his deep affection, to all of which she listened with 
indifference and distaste. We may suppose that this first attack 



260 The Story of an Old Farm. 

on the forti'ess of the widow's heart was several times repeated 
by the undaunted youth before the time appointed for her leav- 
ing Raritan. Nevertheless she did not abate her intentions nor 
delay preparations for the long journey. At last the day of 
departure arrived, and she was just ready to leave the house for 
the sloop that was to convey her to the seaboard when a violent 
storm arose, so wild in its character as to oblige her abandoning, for 
that day at least, all thoughts of leaving home. The detention 
resulted in the vessel on which her passage had been engaged 
sailing without her. The considerable time that elapsed before 
another ship was in readiness for the voyage offered to the young 
student abundant opportunities for pressing his suit, and the 
good woman soon felt that the God of storms for the second time 
plainly indicated the intention of directing her marital affairs. To 
again quote her biographer : — 

The vista down which she directed her view became altogether clianged. Her 
bewilderment respecting the divine dealing with her gave way to the delightful 
apprehension of a purpose on the part of her Heavenly Father * * * and 
the consummation of the conjugal union lay as a definite thing in the future. 

So it was in all the affairs of her life, the most ordinary occur- 
rences were subjects of prayer ; her daily walk and conversation 
abounded in evidences that to her the interests of religion were 
paramount to every duty^ pleasure and experience. It is said 
that so great was her confidence in the Almighty, and in herself, 
that she was resorted to by both weak and strong for pious coun- 
sel. The marked characteristic of her nature Avas the rounded 
harmony existing between its religious and worldly parts ; the 
spiritual and material blended, and all temporal relations were in 
perfect adjustment with eternal conditions. Hers was a nature 
that always and under every circumstance was in complete 
correspondence with its spiritual environment, and while others 
of the brightest faith were often attacked by misgivings, her 
belief was ever as steadfast as the everlasting hills, enabling her 
at all times to say with the Psalmist : " For Thou art my hope, 
O Lord God ; Thou art my trust from my youth." Even minis- 
ters when approaching the pulpit would pause at her pew for 
words of encouragement, which she always had in readiness. To 
quote from Ralph Voorhees' Raritan reminiscences : — 

The Reverend Doctor Ira Condit of New Brunswick, afterwards her minister, 



JuFVROUW Hardenbergh and Doctor Livingston. 261 

requently applied for consolation and advice in seasons of great despondency. 
Atone of these times he went to her, and said he "could not and would not 
preach." "Domine," said she "go and preach ! you don't know what you can do 
until you try." He had to obey. 

The closing years of Mr. Hardenbergh's life were passed in 
the pastorate of the Dutch church at New Brunswick, and in 
the presidency of Queen's, now Rutgers, college. At his death 
it was greatl}' desired that he should be succeeded by Doc- 
tor John H. Livingston of New York, who, however, declined 
at that time to change his field of labor. There has been pre- 
served a letter written to him by Jufvrouw Hardenbergh, as 
she was then called, urging that he alter his decision and 
remove to New Jersey. This communication is a curious and 
interesting exhibit of the freedom and authority with which she 
addressed the eminent clergyman, for although she used the 
most elevated and respectful language, no bishop in admonish- 
ing and warning a recalcitrant priest could have been more 
authoritative in counsel and advice. The letter begins in this 
wise : — 

Most Reverend Sir 

And worthy Brother in our blessed and 

all-worthy Lord Jesus, Zion's King : 
Constrained by a sense of duty and by love to our Dutch Zion I take the liberty 
to send your Reverence a few lines and once more to commend to you our college 
and church ? 

Mrs. Hardenbergh evidently felt that it was Doctor Living- 
ston's duty to leave New York for New Brunswick, and she did 
not hesitate to write : — 

I fear that you perhaps are not obedient to the voice of the Lord as sounding 
forth in the voice of the people. 

She furnished him with abundant scriptural texts whereby his 
views might be strengthened as to its being his duty to do the 
Lord's work in New Jersey, and said : — 

I have heard your Reverence say to my now departed liusband tliat you 
regarded the college as the fountain of our church : why then be engaged by the 
streams and let the fountain dry up? The Holy Ghost has made you overseer 
of that part of His House. Oh that like another Zerubbabel you might be 
encouraged. 

In another part of her letter she volunteers the information: — 

Large cities are often very dangerous * * * to labor for God is certainly 



262 The Story of an Old Farm. 

your delight and your happiness. The Lord enable you to discover what is His 
Holy will. 

Farther on she writes : — 

Now worthy Sir I have a single request to make to you ; will your Reverence 
speedily let me know whether you have perfect peace in your mind in relation 
to your residing in New York ? 

She closes the long epistle bj expressing her hearty love for 
Mrs. Livingston, and the hope that the Lord would "sustain her 
ladyship in her infirmities." And then with ceremonious sal- 
utations she subscribed herself 

Most Reverend Sir, Your Reverence's handmaid and loving friend in our 
Lord Jesus Christ. 

Dinah Hardenbergh, 
by birth Van Bergh. 

Being a woman there must needs be a postscript, which was to 
inform the doctor : 

No one knows of this letter excepting one female friend. It is between the 
Lord and us. 

Mrs. Hardenbergh expressed great fear in this letter that 
the college and church would fall under the sway of a Presby- 
terian, and her apprehensions proved to be well grounded. 
Her husband's successor in the pulpit was Doctor Ira Condit, a 
disciple of John Knox, who, however, conformed to all the 
requirements of the Dutch church. She spoke of him afterward 
as the "beloved Condit," so we may believe she accepted 
Doctor Livingston's refusal at that time with equanimity. 
Another instance is given of her offering advice and admonition 
to a minister. On one occasion a clergyman called to manifest 
his respect, and to profit by her counsel. Before separating 
it was proposed that they should unite in prayer, whereupon 
the domine addressed the Throne of Grace in such loud and 
boisterous tones as to much grieve and annoy the good Avoman. 
Upon rising from her knees she said to the vociferous supplicant : 
" Your God, Sir, must be different from mine, for mine can hear 
even though no words be uttered, but yours it seems cannot 
unless addressed in the loudest of tones." 

This excellent woman survived her second husband seventeen 
years, dying in 1807 at the ripe age of eighty-one. It is emi- 
nently proper that we should dwell thus long upon her virt ues and 



Bedminster Church Founded. 263 

peculiarities when it is remembered that she was the first to 
occupy in the Reformed Dutch congregation of Bedmister the 
important position of minister's wife. About the time that young 
Domine Hardenbergh assumed charge of the united congrega- 
tions, many of his flock who lived north of Pluckamin, feeling in 
need of a church nearer home, urged the organization of a new 
congregation. The most prominent families in this movement 
were those of Jacobus Van der Veer and Gruisbert Sutphen. Of 
the former we have already learned something as to his settling 
on the Axtell tract, near where the Peapack road crosses the 
north branch of the Raritan. He was zealous in religious mat- 
ters ; his name is to be found on the books of the Lamington 
Presbyterian church, and in 1756 he subscribed five pounds 
toward the erection of St. Paul's Lutheran church at Pluckamin. 
Guisbert Sutphen lived on a farm lying half a mile north 
of the Larger. Cross Roads, which is now owned and occupied 
by his great-grandson, Amos Sutphen. With his wife, Ari- 
ontje Van ?elt, he had entered the township in 1743, travel- 
ling with their children and household goods in an ox-cart 
from Monmouth county, where his father, also named Guisbert, 
had settled early in the century. 

When it was decided to buikl Bedminster church, differences 
of opinion arose as to the location. Both Sutphen and Van 
der Veer offered liberal inducements to have the building placed 
at points of their selection. Mr. Sutphen's choice was for the 
vicinity of the Larger Cross Roads, but eventually Mr. Van der 
Veer's views prevailed, and the new structure was erected on the 
site of the present edifice below the village of the Lesser Cross 
Roads, or Bedminster. The first minute of the new con- 
gregation was made by Mr. Hardenbergh in the Raritan 
church books on Christmas, 1758. It records a meeting at the 
parsonage of the consistories of North Branch, Neshanic, op de 
Millstone, Raritan and Bedminster ; when for the last congrega- 
tion elders Jacobus Van der Veer and Jacob Banta, and deacons 
Rynier Van Neste and Cornelius Lane were appointed " opsin- 
dercnsi'^ or overseers. It is probable that the church was erected 
in that or the following year. Two acres of land were donated 
by Jacobus Van der Veer, who also furnished fifty pounds 
sterling and onc-tliird of all the oak timber. The same amount 



264 The Story of an Old Farm. 

of money, together with one-half of the oak necessary for the 
frame, was the gift of Guisbert Sutphen. Not then, as would be 
now, were architects, contractors, carpenters and masons called 
together to contribute their brains and labor toward the erection 
of the edifice. The members of the congregation assembled with 
ox-tearas. axes and stout arms. By them were the oaks felled, 
the timbers squared and drawn to the spot selected ; perhaps the 
services of Caspar Berger, or some other good mason, were 
secured for laying the foundations, but without doubt much of 
the work was contributed by those most interested. 

And we can well imagine with what interest these simple 
country folk watched the growth and assisted in the completion 
of their new house of worship. The chiu'ch meant much more 
to the early settlers than now — in those days religion was not a 
matter for Sunday's consideration alone — it stood first in every 
one's estimation, taking precedence of all matters secular. 
Philosophy had not yet opened the eyes or befogged the minds 
of these honest Jersey people, and for one of their* number to 
have been a doubter, or in any way unorthodox, would have 
insured not only the passive but the active condemnation of every 
able-bodied man in the neighborhood. Nor was there at that 
time the carelessness and callousness as to spiritual things which 
the distresses and demoralization of Revolutionary years subse- 
quently engendered. To a community, therefore, whose chief 
interests and hopes of life all circulated about the church, we can 
readily appreciate that to have been without a house of God 
would seemingly have endangered not only its peace in the next 
world, but the possibility of success in this. So it is easy to 
picture the rejoicing and prayers of thanksgiving that ascended to 
Heaven, when the last nail was driven and the finishing touches 
given to the new building. 

When completed, a more bare or a more unimaginative struc- 
ture could hardly have been conceived. Prosaic to a degree, 
and entirely wanting in decorative details, it was wholly witiiout 
architectural residts save that it enclosed space and shut ofi' the 
weather ; in other words, it was a meeting-house, nothing 
more. It was nearly square, being a little greater in breadth 
than in length. A peaked roof, without cupola or belfry, cap- 
ped low walls, the side ones being each pierced with two square 



First Service in Bedminster Church. 265 

windows. The roof and exterior walls were similar in appear- 
ance, both being covered with shingles rounded at the ends, that 
had been riven and shaved by members of the congregation. In 
fact all of this prim and precise building was " home-made," 
excepting the window glass and nails. The latter were probably 
wrought at Mendham. The Dodds and Axtells of that place 
used to manufacture iron in a primitive fashion from ore that was 
packed over from Dover in sacks on the backs of horses. In the 
broad front gable of the new chiu'ch was the entrance, the door 
of which opened directly on the ground without any porch or 
protecting portico. A single aisle extended to the steep stair- 
case which led up into a lofty, round, box-like pulpit, perched on 
a tall pillar or column. The interior was not plastered, the walls 
and ceiling being lined with cedar, and a short gallery stretched 
across the south end of the auditorium. There were no stoves 
or any means of warming the building ; old ladies during the 
winter months, in order to keep their feet warm, brought ^' to- 
meetin," peiforated wooden boxes containing an inner casing of 
iron, filled with live coals. It was not until after the erection of 
the second church in 1818 that, in the face of much opposition, 
wood-burning stoves were introduced. Many of the good people 
thought that as God's grace had warmed both souls and bodies 
from the beginning it should do so till the end. 

To the worshippers, this plain, gaunt structure, destitute of 
paint, outside or in, and without comeliness or symmetry, 
appeared as a commodious temple. It is to be regretted that no 
record has been preserved of the first services held in this primi- 
tive church. We can without difficulty, hoAvever, see in imag- 
ination the rude and naked interior peopled by a homely but 
happy congregation. We know that high up in the tall, 
undraped pulpit under a broad sounding board stood the young 
minister, while below him was the precentor, or lining-deacon, 
who lined out the good old Psalm tunes to the members of the 
flock, who were seated in great square pews ; the middle-aged 
and old people with their faces toward the domine, the children 
opposite ; while to the right and left sat the stalwart youths and 
modest maidens, who lent their ears to the sermon, but like the 
lads and lasses of to-day's congregations, I doubt not, gave their 
glances to " eyes which spake again." 



CHAPTER XIX. 

More Changes in Bedminster — The Mills on Peapach Brook 
— Boyish Reminiscences — Marriages and Deaths. 

The procession of the seasons continues, and life on the " Old 
Farm " goes bravely on. No sooner has the ermine mantle of 
winter disappeared under the kindly influences of the soft south 
winds of spring, before the crocuses cleave the still half frozen 
earth. The pond and river, swelling in volume, burst their icy 
bounds, and the drear days brought by overcast heavens give 
place to sunnier skies and longer hours. The woods that have 
so long exposed their anatomy to the keen wintry blasts again 
shows signs of awakening life ; green can be discovered among 
the sassafras branches, and yellow among the willows, while the 
maple buds redden sufficiently to give a warm hue to the entire 
tree. Leaf and blossom again take possession of the earth, 
clothing it with glory. 

8oon the hillsides are marked by plough and harrow, and the 
seed falls in generous showers. The crocuses have long since 
had their day, and June roses illumine the newly planted door- 
yard. And now the haymakers have come and gone in the 
meadowSj reapers are on the upland fields, and pyramids of 
golden sheaves adorn the landscape. Bees hum in the clover, 
the breath of.all nature is sweet and redolent with wild thyme, 
mint and fragrant aromatic herbage, while harvest apples in 
heaps of red and yellow lie imder the trees in the orchard. 
Summer drifts into autumn. Pumpkins show their golden sides 
under the corn shocks, and the noise of the flail is abroad in the 
land. The world begins to glow in color as the October sun 
paints in deepening crimson and ochre, leaf, and herb, and 
lichen. The distant hill-tops now blend with the heavens, and a 



Mills on Peapick Beook Established. 267 

golden shade diffuses itself over the face of the country. In the 
mornings amber-colored mists hang lightly over the lowland 
pastm'es, and the landscape is veiled in the vague, 3'ellow indis- 
tinctness of Indian summer days. The brown acorns drop from 
their browner cups ; the walnuts and chestnuts rattle through, 
the branches upon the heads of expectant urchins who welcome, 
below, the toothsome hail. Again the paths through the woods 
are deep in the dry mummies of summer's luxuriance ; the gusty 
winds bloAv over fields that, having lost their bloom, lie brown 
and dusky on the long hill that stretches westward toward the 
gray horizon. Once more the feathery flakes descend, covering 
the gromid with whiteness and silence ; — the procession of the 
seasons continues, and life on the " Old Farm" goes bravely on. 

Not only were the lands improved, the outbuildings increased 
in number, and fences made more substantial, but under Aaron's 
care the tannery below the hill developed into one of the most 
important industries of that character in the province. A large 
frame structure was erected . adjoining the house, in which the 
leather was curried, both negroes and whites aiding in the work and 
in that of grinding the bark. The number of vats below the dam 
was increased to eighteen, and the water-power much improved. 
This latter was done in connection with the joint owners of th^ 
water-rights on the opposite side of Peapack brook, who, then, 
as now, utilized their portion in grinding grist and sawing lum- X 
ber. The exact date of establishing a flouring-mill at this 
point has not been ascertained, but it is well known to have been 
the first mill erected in the township. Among the papers of the 
New Jersey Historical Society is a map of George Leslie's grant 
made by Samuel Willmot in 1751. It calls for eleven hundred 
and eighty-seven and one-quarter acres, and shows that at that 
early date a grist and saw mill were already standing on the 
west side of Peapack brook. 

There is little doubt that these mills Avere erected by Wil- 
liam Allen. On the twenty-first of January, 1750, the '• major 
part of the executors of the last will and testament of Doctor 
John Johnstone, dec'd," conveyed to Thomas Clandenin in con- 
sideration of twenty-eight pounds and eight shillings, eighteen )^ 
acres of land, lying in the forks of the brook and of the north 
branch of the Raritan river. On the same day, and on the back 



268 The Story of an Old Farm. 

of this instrument, Clandenin sends greeting, and gives notice 
"To All Christican People'" that he has sold to "William Allen, 
his heirs and assigns forever, this present indenture and all mes- 
suages, lands, tenements, and hereditaments to the same belong- 
ing." The consideration was "the sum of two hundred and twenty 
pounds, ten shillings, current money of New Jersey at eight 
shillings to the ounce." The wording of this transfer, together 
with the amount of consideration mentioned, would lead one to 
suppose that buildings of some kind — perhaps a saw and grist 
mill — had already been erected ; yet all traditi(ms concur in 
naming William Allen as the person who iirst established mills 
in Bedminster township. He died in 1761, his will being dated 
on the twenty-third of May, and proved on the sixth of July of 
the same year. In it these eighteen acres are devised as follows : 

I give, bequeath and devise unto my two sons, Robert and Joseph, the house I 
now live in, and the mill and lands wliereon tliey stand, and all my other rights 
or improvements of tlie ninety-two acres of land adjoining to said mill lot, with 
all the farming utensils and the utensils for the mill now on the same, and all 
other my movable estate, to them and their heirs or assigns forever equally 
between them their heirs or assigns forever. 

The new owners had not been milling many years before they 
discovered that Peapack brook did not at all times contain 
Sufficient water to supply the races that turned three mill wheels. 
They consequently conceived th(! idea of increasing the volume 
by diverting water from the north branch of the Raritan. For 
the benefit of those unfamiliar with the locality, it would be well 
to explain that Peapack brook, about a quarter of a mile above 
its mouth, runs for a considerable way parallel with and some 
three hundred feet distant from the branch. These streams are 
separated by a long narrow hill known as the *' Hogback, " and 
imtil within twenty years the highwaj' climbed this ridge and 
ran along its spine, instead of f:)llowing the bank of the larger 
stream as at present. At this point a dam was built which, 
checking the flow of the branch, created a reservoir. The hill 
was then tunnelled, forming an aqueduct six feet high and three 
feet broad ; it being c(mstructed on an incline, a considerable 
quantity of additional water was, through it, led into the 
smaller stream, thus greatly augmenting the powers of the lat- 
ter in serving the mills near its mouth. With the strange fatal- 
ity that often attaches to local nomenclature in rural communities 



The Mysterious "Folly." 269 

this undertaking has always been known as the '^ Folly." It 
may have been because the results secured were not considered 
commensurate with the outlay. There is no doubt that before 
the completion of the work, the Aliens became financially embar- 
rassed and were forced on the twenty -fifth of December, 1766, 
to convey the eighteen acres, together with the mills and build- 
ings, to Stephen Hunt. 

This watery basin and its mysterious outlet have always pos- 
sessed peculiar fascinations for Bedminster boys. It was their 
rendezvous in my early days for miles around. In January its 
flanking hill shut off the north winds, securing a sheltered skat- 
ing pond of smooth firm ice. Travellers by the old highway 
over the "Hogback," on winter Saturdays, were sure to hear the 
ring of the skaters' steel, and to be greeted by their joyous 
shouts as they "ground the bar," cut the intricate "pigeon 
wing" or mastered the "outside edge" — feats of no little diffi- 
culty on the old-fashioned, clumsy, gutter-runnered skates. In 
August the same hill guarded a cool, shady pool, which fairly 
invited a plunge into its pellucid depths. At no place along the 
branch did catfish, dace or shiners congregate in greater num- 
bers, or appear more willing to be enticed to the surface by 
the rude tackle of the country lads. And then there was the 
*' Folly " ! Was there ever a more weird or forbidden spot 
upon which the imagination of a stripling could feed f What 
horrors might not lurk within its grim and silent portals. To 
explore its interior and brave its ambushed uncertainties was the 
one supreme test of youthful valor. 

Where is the small boy that could ever withstand being 
" double-dared " ? Not the writer, at least, in his callow years. It 
was this goad that incited him one summer's day of long ago to 
penetrate the " Hogback " through the dread " Folly." Certain 
it is that Dante could not have felt more dismayed on reading 
" All hope abandon, ye who enter in," than did he when girt for 
the journey. With him there was no encouraging Virgil, as 
pushing aside the vines that partially hid the low entrance to the 
tunnel, he boldly groped his way into the very bowels of the 
earth. Altogether it was a solemn sort of place for a small boy 
to find himself in. The walls were moist and slimy, and as the 
waters flowed in a swift current about his naked ankles, imagin- 



270 The Story of an Old Farm. 

ation peopled them with eels, snakes and all manner of creeping 
things; with every step on the rocky bed squirming creatures 
seemed to escape from beneath his halting feet. On nearing the 
centre of the dark and gloomy conduit daylight gradually disap- 
peared, and courage began to ooze away. Suddenly a jagged 
dripping wall opposed further advance. Thinking that the 
aqueduct had come to a sudden end, for a moment terror paralyzed 
all eftbrts at progress, but discovery was soon made that it 
turned sharply to the left. Its construction had been simultane- 
ously undertaken froni both sides of the hill ; through miscalcu- 
lation the workmen had failed to meet in the centre, rendering a 
double elbow in the tunnel necessary. Feeling his way around 
these corners, the glimmer of sunlight could be discerned from 
the farther end, lightening the urchin's heart as well as lighting 
the ghostly recesses of the archway. Pressing on with increasing 
confidence and more hurried steps, egress was soon made into 
daylight on the Peapack brook side of the hill, where his com- 
panions received him with open arms and great honor. For 
many days thereafter your narrator was the hero of the small 
boy society of that neighborhood. 

But let us return to the mills ; a direction in which your scribe's 
steps have always turned with eager anticipation. Even now, 
when the half-way house of the ordinary span of life has been 
passed, he never approaches this sequestered vale, and feels the 
warm breath of summer, cooled by the balm that rises from its 
rapid streams, without his heart bounding with delight. Des- 
cai'te writes that a person should not seek to gratify his desires 
so much as to endeavor to restrain them ; notwithstanding such 
excellent advice, and though remembering that what may give 
pleasure in the writing, may not prove equally agreeable in the 
reading, I cannot refrain from further youthful reminiscence. 
I must tell of these mills and of their attractive surroundings. 

Is there any picture more completely to a boy's fancy than an 
old mill, with its alluring adjuncts of pond and dam and rock- 
paved stream ? or, for that matter, to a man's fancy, if, as I sus- 
pect is the case with many of us, a good boy has been spoiled in 
the man's making i Just such a picture can be seen in the 
entourage of what is now known as Schomp's mills, which are 
seated in the deep valley where end the descending acres of the 



The Mill Below the Hill. 271 

" Old Farm." In attempting the description of simple scenes 
made beautiful by early associations, one finds it difficult to con- 
vey impressions, the birth of which is largely due to the deep 
sympathies of well-remembered youthful pleasures. Were my 
pen unchecked it would run riot with adjective and exclamation; 
while this might be sufficient for the needs of my expression, it 
would not go far toward conveying to others an idea of this old 
water-power and its pleasant surroundings. Let us suppose, 
then, that all effort at description is abandoned, and leaving the 
old homestead, together we will visit the mill below the hill. You 
can see for yourself what it is like — but remember ! I shall look 
at it with boyish eyes — be sure that you do the same. 

Passing through a decrepit wicket at the lower end of the 
garden, a little path, worn smooth by over a century of foot- 
falls, winding down the side of the hill leads to the brook below 
the pond. Time was when its bordering strip of meadow was 
pierced with vats. Memories shoulder each other just here, and 
the ground seems to exhale ancient odors, which, borne over the 
years of time, fashion in the mind a picture that includes an 
antique bark mill with its complaining wheel, great heaps of 
tan, long lines of drying hides, and piles of sacks of freshly 
ground oak-bark. Recollection paints, too, a scene in which your 
guide figures in the foreground as a truant toddler, staggering 
with the delight of forbidden jo3^s among the tan vats ; while in 
the middle distance is the view of a nui'sery maid, with fluttering 
skirts and a nimbus of dishevelled hair, flying down the hill 
with warning cries to rescue the youngster from a possible 
immersion in the acid baths. But enough of youthful remem- 
brances. Here, facing us, is Peapack brook. Is it not an invit- 
ing waterway ? Interspersed with grassy islands, and arched 
by venerable trees, it is fed by the curving waters falling in 
rhythmic melody from the dam, and on the hottest of summer 
days the air is fresh and cool with the fragrant breath of the 
descending flood. Crossing the stream by springing from mossy 
stone to slippery boulder — you must not mind wetting your 
feet — we are soon in front of the mifl. It is much like many 
others planted along the numerous water-courses that swell the 
flood of the Raritan river. A succession of lofty doors rise one 
above the other to the apex of the gable, in one of which gener- 



272 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

ally stands the dtisty miller, di'awing in fat bags of grist from the 
overhanging tackle, or guiding descending sacks of flour to the 
farmers' teams below. The great water-soaked, overshot wheel, 
which in mj boyish days creaked and groaned in its ponderous, 
dripping revolutions, is no longer here. Its work is now less 
picturesquely but more powerfully and silently done by two 
insignificant turbines, sunk deep in the rapid current of the race. 

On entering, our nostrils are tickled by the floating particles of 
the floury atmosphere, and the building trembles with the 
rumbling of turning shafts and swiftly moving gear. Passing 
between bins of grain, and barrels tiered ceiling high, we ascend 
to the grinding floor, which is almost on a level with the pond. 
The interior of the building is yellow with the deposits of years 
of gently descending mealy showers, that have long since hidden 
the original color of its beams and joists ; while the burring 
sound of the grinding stones falls upon the ear as one of the pleas- 
antest of all the busy hums of human industry. The western 
gable — resting on piles — rises directly from the pond ; its image 
reflected in the tranquil water has much of the completeness of 
the mill itself. Often on a summer's afternoon have I from its 
rear door cast the baited hook, and, if not rewarded by a nib- 
ble, have been more than content in idly w^atching the sleepy 
bosom of the pond mirror the fleecy clouds floating in the blue 
expanse above. On such occasions the rural sights and sounds 
seen and heard on every side were always a source of delight to 
my nature-loving heart. Stretched on a soft pile of bags, 
dreaming away a few summer hours in lazily watching the float- 
ing cork swirl in the eddies, and in drinking in the moisture- 
laden atmosphere of the watery landscape, seemed ever a happy 
occupation and never a loss of time. 

On the right are rich fields of grass and grain, and between 
them and the water on the gently ascending incline of the 
bank rests a group of farm buildings. They almost surround 
an ample barn-yard, from which come the pleasant country 
sounds of lowing cattle and bleating sheep, while awkward 
ducklings noisily quack as they waddle down to their convenient 
element. To the left is a little saw-mill — not much more than a 
timbered skeleton — through whose ribs you see flashing the 
upright saw, jagging with hoarse cry its hungry teeth into the 



A Famous Swimming Hole. 273 

slowly approaching logs. Beyond is the great floodgate, with 
little gurgling riUs percolating through its seams and fissures ; it 
is framed with massive, slimy beams, from which the frequent 
small boy of the neighborhood spends many a happy hour in 
endeavoring to beguile the wary catfish from the cool depths. 
The stone dam, with its liquid curtain, extends from the gate to 
the farther shore which, with a graceful curve, lies in the deep 
shadows of a steep bank of bordering trees, whose drooping 
branches pressing outward overhang the peaceful pool, — Narcis- 
sus-like, in rapt admiration of their own mirrored beauty. At 
the head of the pond the waters shallow, and from their meagre 
depths rise bullrushes and reedy weeds, which finally overgrow 
the surface and harden into low banks of bog and sedge, through 
which the supplying brook slowly makes its way. 

Thinking over long ago, arresting memory brings to mind 
many interesting spots in the vicinity of this old miU that are 
associated with youthful experiences. I have one now in my 
thoughts — a famous swimming place, called the " Jinny Hole." 
It is not far from the head of the pond; the brook suddenly 
deepens, and its almost perpendicular sides admit of one's div- 
ing in safety from the sedgy banks. It must be confessed that 
ambitious plungers, who in the hey-day of my remembrance 
sank too deep beneath the wave, found plenty of soft mud lying 
in wait at the bottom ; and clambering out on the low banks was 
always a miry business. But there were compensations, not the 
least being the interest that attached to the tales that were apt 
to be told, while dressing, of the individual from whom the hole 
derived its name — Miss Jane Bailey, a simple maiden of complex 
attainments, who, like Betty Flannigan, could recollect her 
" frinds for a month" and her " inimies for a year." Jinny has 
long since gone over to the "silent majority," which has also 
absorbed most of her " frinds" and " inimies," but fifty years 
ago she was a noted character along Peapack brook. 

James Bailey and his wife Peggy were Irish Presbyterians, 
who came to this country about 1790, and settled on forty acres 
of land adjoining the "Old Farm," at the head of the mill-pond. 
They both died before 1810, leaving two daughters. Jinny and 
Peggy, who continued living on the same property. Jinny did 
all the farm work, ploughing, planting, sowing and reaping, 
18 



274 The Story of an Old Farm. 

without calling in the aid of any of the neighbors. Peggy died 
in 1831, after Avhich Jinny lived alone until her death in 1836. 
She is remembered as a short spare woman, bent nearly double 
with rheumatism ; her face, the color of parchment, was fur- 
rowed and wrinkled by age, while coarse, white, uncombed hair 
covered her head and hung down to her shoulders. Her dress 
was always the same, a blue, linsey, home-woven short-gown and 
petticoat, with a tow string tied around her waist, and a man's 
large straw hat on her head ; she always walked with a cane much 
taller than herself. 

Jinny's appearance was in accord with her character ; she 
believed in witches, ghosts, dreams, signs and sounds, and 
among the ignorant people of ^the vicinity had a most uncanny 
reputation. She was Irish to her crooked back-bone, but, 
though superstitious, was always ready to fight the church 
of Rome from the lowest-down Catholic up to the pope. 
As a red rag is to an infuriated bull, so was the mention of the 
" Scarlet Woman" within Jinny's hearing. It was only neces- 
sary for predatory bands of boy-tormentors to hint that all Irish 
men and women were papists, to cause her tawny face to flame 
with passion, and to call out her richest vocabulary of vitupera- 
tion. At such times she looked a veritable Witch of Endor. 
Waving her shrivelled arms and shaking her hoary locks in 
anger, she shrieked contumely upon the heads of her tormentors 
and upon those of every Catholic that ever lived, while her hag- 
gard eyes flashed with all the rage and hate of a Meg Merrilles 
when cursing the enemies of the heir of EUangowan. I am 
afraid that these pages are Jinny's only monumental stone ; there 
is none to mark the grave in Lamington churchyard where she 
lies buried. With the passing away of the present generation 
she would probably have been forgotten, so we may consider that 
we have added a little to local Bedminster history by preserving 
her memory from oblivion. Her only relics are among my 
papers. One is the inventory made after her death of her personal 
effects, which consisted mainly of spinning-wheels, thatching- 
forks, a hatchel, a flax breaker, a calabash and a few farming 
implements. Another is Jinny's note of hand given in 1812 to 
Daniel Melick for two dollars, which, notwithstanding her anti- 
Catholicism, she signed with a cross large enough to suggest the 
possibility of its having been made with the end of her long staff. 



A Cosy Nook. 275 

There is another spot about this old mill that has an especial 
charm of its own. It is reached by following the stream a short 
distance to where the highway crosses by a dusty wooden bridge, 
the centre abutments of which rest upon an elongated island that 
splits the rapid current of the brook. Dropping from the bridge 
you may make your way down this green island to where the 
divided waters join. Seat yourself, now, on this mossy bank 
under the shadowy concealments of these low-spreading branches ; 
you will find that you have penetrated deep into the heart of 
rural loveliness. Do you not think it a cosy nook I Although 
the clear waters of the rapidly flowing stream babble at your 
feet, the green canopy above is astir with twittering birds, and 
the soft wind comes laden with the faint cadences of the splash 
of the dam's cascade, yet, such an air of repose broods over the 
spot, that you feel the environment of an atmosphere of intense 
quiet, until you imagine yourself secluded from the world, as if 
you had found your way to a place of rare beauty hitherto 
undiscovered. What a bower in which to drowse away an after- 
noon with Thoreau or John Burroughs ! or, should you have no 
book, just to lie supinely in the long grass, inhaling the woodsy- 
watery odors — the subtle emanations of earth, trees and stream — 
till your entire being seems permeated with the very essence of 
the hidden secrets of nature. 

After all, the picture we have attempted to draw is not wholly 
true. It is of the aspect of the brook in the past rather than of 
the present. What a disappointment on revisiting familiar boy- 
ish scenes to find that they differ from the picture one's memory 
has carried through all the years ! That hills grow smaller may 
be charged to the lengthened leverage of adult legs, but the 
decrease in the volume of the water-ways can be more directly 
explained. As we meet the streams of our boyhood, ranging 
through wood and meadow, they bear an altered face. Like us 
they have changed with the years. While it is to be hoped that 
we with advancing age have grown deeper and broader — not so 
with the rivers. The vandal hands that robbed the timbered 
hillsides that guarded their sources were at the same time shal- 
lowing their pools and bringing the impeding stones of their 
beds much nearer the surface. Now, in foamy agitation, they 
protest with loud voice against the loss of their former torrents. 



276 The Story of an Old Farm. 

The procession of the seasons continues, and life on the *^ Old 
Farm " goes bravely on ! As the years have rolled away many 
changes are to be noted among the occupants of the " Stone 
House." . Three more children have come to Aaron and his 
wife: Elizabeth, born on the eighth of November, 1765; Mar- 
garet, on the twenty-second of December, 1767; and Maria, 
on the twenty-fourth of March, 1771. Not only have new lives 
entered into the family, a little grave is to be seen by the side of 
those of the grandparents in the Lutheran burying-ground at 
Pluckamin, for death for the third time has knocked at the door 
and claimed his own. Elizabeth, one unhappy May morning 
before she was three years old, while playing about the bark mill, 
fell under its great revolving wheel and was so crushed that 
within eight days, on the fourteenth of May, 1768, she died. 

Aaron and his family, together with his dependents, are now — 
1775 — the sole occupants of the " Old Stone House " ; his 
brothers and sisters having married and made their homes else- 
where. Philip and Peter married, respectively, Maria and 
Mary Magdalena King. The wives were probably sisters, and 
they are presumed to have been the daughters of Marcus King, 
who was a Bedminster resident at that time and active in church 
and county measures. Among my documents is a yellow, time- 
stained bond for two hundred pounds, dated the twenty-ninth 
of May, 1765, and given by Aaron, Marcus King and Jacobus Van 
der Veer, to John Van der Veerof Flatbush, Long Island. There is 
good reason for believing that this bond Avas to secure money 
borroAved for the benefit of the Bedminster church. This 
opinion is confirmed by the fact of the interest — as is shown 
by the endorsements on its back — having repeatedly been paid by 
Guisbert Sutphen, who was for a number of years treasurer of 
that congregation. Some of these interest receipts are written 
in Dutch ; those in English employ the following singular reiter- 
ative phraseology : " May the first 17 — then Received the full 
Interest Upon Bond I say Received by me." It is also interest- 
ing to notice that the payee signed his name in the five following 
various ways : Van der veer, V. D. Veer, Van Derveer, Vander 
Veer and Van Der Veer. It would seem that over a century 
ago members of this Dutch family were as undecided as to the 
correct spelling of their surnames as are those of to-day. In 



A German Schoolmaster. 277 

the body of this bond Aaron's name appears as Melogh, but in 
signing he wrote it Malick. 

Johannes' second daughter and fourth child married, sometime 
previous to 1768, Simon Ludewig Himroth, or, as the name is 
now spelled, Himrod. They remained in Bedminster until 
1772, when they removed to Northumberland county, Pennsyl- 
vania, where their descendants are now numerous. Himroth 
was a compatriot of Aaron's, being a Bendorf boy ; this is shown 
by the following interesting letter written by our old friend of 
twenty years ago — Job. Georg Hager. To my mind there is a 
wholesome flavor about the Herr Praeceptor^s letters that makes 
pleasant reading. His words have an honest ring, and seem- 
ingly flow from the pen of one whose heart beats with sympathy 
for his fellows. I can fancy him seated in his deep leathern 
chair in a quaint German parlor, its low ceilings and black- 
ened beams but half lighted by small round panes set in lead. 
He wears ratteen breeches, and a well-worn velvet coat with 
brass buttons. On the table by his side is his cotton cap with 
its pendant tassel ; within easy reach is a great mug of blue 
ware filled with foaming beer, while from his mouth hangs a 
drooping pipe with a brass stopper and chain. On looking up 
from his letter, he can see through the open kitchen door the 
frail Magdalena, with gay bodice and blue woollen petticoat, pat- 
tering from fireplace to dresser, giving the finishing touches to 
noudels and linoepc, or stirring the rich flour soup whose savory 
odors mingle with those exhaled from a pot of schokolate, sim- 
mering on the hearth. 

Cannot you see the schoolmaster as he gossips over the home 
news, and fashions his courteous sentences of friendship and 
good wishes ? A little too red in the face perhaps, and a trifle 
too ample in girth, but his short, upright gray hair surmounts 
a broad, smooth forehead stamped with intelligence and 
sentiment. His small blue eyes twinkle with good nature, a 
comically fierce moustache hides his mouth, and under his full 
chin there always lurks a chuckle. You may depend upon it he 
was a good man, and won the hearts of those with whom he 
came in contact. His letters show him to have been both cheer- 
ful and wise ; his merry nature and sound understanding must 
have diff'used genial influences, and we can imagine the villagers 



278 The Story of an Old Farm. 

always giving him bearty greeting, and ever being eager for a 
cbat on meeting bira in the street, or on spying him smoking 
a post-prandial pipe in his garden. 

Now for news from the old country : — 

Bendokf February loth, 1769. 
My beloved friends from all parts ! 

Your letter of November 15th, 1768, as also that one of 1764, came duly to 
hand, tlie latter of whicli I answered immediately, but, as I learn from the former, 
my answer did not arrive. I received this letter of November 15 by the friend 
S. Bastian through a messenger sent for this purpose. Since I cannot speak 
to the above named friend myself, and hearing that he passes the night in Cob- 
lentz I set pen to paper instantly, so that no opportunity is lost, and you have 
news how we get on. So far no special change has arrived, but that cousin Anton 
Kirberger has died ; his children are partly happy, partly unhappy, in their 
matrimony, and in that house many things have changed. 

Concerning myself, my wife and my children, I can state that we are — thank 
God — all well. My eldest son is since three years in the employ of a wine- 
cooper in Amsterdam, and may -be, that if he can not make his fortune there, he 
will visit America. The second one works with an assessor in Wetzlar, both do 
quite well. My youngest son and three little daughters are with me. My 
brotiier-in-law William is safe and well with your family and will soon celebrate 
Christening with his second wife. All of them send their best regards to you. 
My wife and myself, who have not yet visited cousin judge in Hochstenbach as 
long as we are married, made a call on liim last fall; he and she are perfectly 
well ; I told them all about what you had written to me. He wishes you well^ 
As I write you directly without losing any time and cannot therefore send him 
the letter yet so I shall ask him to write to you a letter; as soon as I find an 
opportunity I siiall try my best to send it to you. 

I was especially pleased by the news that cousin Simon Himroth has become your 
brother-in-law, a .scholar whom I have tauglit, and one who has kept himself 
well all the time; he will do that also henceforth. I and my wife send him our 
most cordial regards; he understands well how to write, why does he not 
write me ? 

In our country a poor time prevails at present, because of the wine-man hav- 
ing since nearly six years not brougiit a good wine-year; therefore little food for 
the poor people. My wife sends her especial regards and kisses to her cousin 
Veronica. May the Lord redeem her the loss of her dear parents and give wel- 
fare to the whole family and have her grow and nourish in luck and well-doing. 
If you get a chance give my compliments to Herr faesch, who is doing well I 
suppose since one does not hear much of him ; perhaps he has married there a 
nice American lady. As I do not know any other news to report I finish with 
the desire that the grace of God Almighty shall be with you as well as with our- 
selves, so tliat we may always have to report good respective news. Give my 
regards to the cousins all by their names. Tliere may come a time yet, if we 
should live longer, when we shall see each other personally and entertain our- 
.'<elves by word of mouth. 

Wherewith I remain my highly esteemed cousin's obedient servant and 
amiably devoted JOH. Georg Hager. 



Simon Himroth's Letter. 



279 



The preceptor was right. Himrod certainly could have 
written to his old teacher. His first letter from Pennsylvania — 
with which I will close this chapter — in penmanship reflects 
much credit upon the tuition of the Bendorf schoolmaster. 

Northumberland County, July 27, 1772. 
My dearest brother-in-law : Your letter of the 16th has duly come to 
hand, from which I learn that you are all in good health, which I am glad to 
hear; as regards ourselves we are also in good health, although I went through 
a dangerous illness, still our good Lord has had mercy with me and assisted me 
in recovering, wherefore I cannot be thankful enough to Him, for I had a most 
serious pain on the right side of my breast together with a severe hot fever 
which produced such a fearful collapse within a few days that everybody who 
saw me never expected to see me up again, but our Lord be blessed for the rem- 
edies I took which enabled me within a fortnight to recover, so that I am now 
■commencing to work again. I will have to postpone my returning until Septem- 
ber first, because I propose to clear yet three acres of land and to raise wheat on 
it in order to have some pastry on our return from Jersey. In regard to our 
things I think it best, if you will have them sold by the time I am coming so 
that we may get ready to start so much the sooner. You must sell all the house- 
hold goods excepting all the iron works and any thing made of iron, all the rest 
"wehave already ordered to be made here; and then we must have a strongbox to 
put things in. About Mr. Barker we will see and arrange when I come. My 
salutation to all our friends in Jersey, also from Sturm and his wife ; the Lord 
bless you all, meanwhile I remain yours very truly, 

Simon Himroth. 







CHAPTER XX. 

The Muttering that Preceded the Storm of the Revolution — 
Stamp Acts, Revenue Bills and Other Unjust Imposts 
Weaken the Loyalty of the New Jersey People — Arming for 
the Fray. 

It requires no special sagacity to discover that the embarrass- 
ments peculiar to a work of this character are many. The 
writer often finds himself encompassed by a mass of material 
from which to choose subjects for his pages, ranging from the 
merest social and personal trifles up to those important political 
events that now begin to crowd the stage upon which his actors 
are distributed. The difficulties of selection are great, and he 
is forced to contend against the temptation of choosing those 
pleasing trifles that will embellish the page, rather than to dwell 
on more momentous affairs which would give added weight and 
value to the narration. Yet, who shall say what is important — 
which of the trifles or traditions have value, or should be pre- 
served. The warp and woof of local history are often made up of 
little motes that the sunbeams of research discover floating in 
the dusty and indistinct atmosphere of antiquity. Placed on 
the loom by the weaver of history, they soon fashion themselves 
into an interesting web, and in conjunction with other facts and 
theories gradually form a fabric that bears on its texture in the 
vivid colors of th* present a picture of circumstances and events 
that fitly and beautifully illustrate a past age. 

But just here there is no need of hesitating as to the choice of 
trifles. Important events elbow themselves forward and assert 
recognition. With the telling of the story of the " Old Farm," 
it is also necessary to give a current picture of the times ; 



The Stamp Act. 281 

we are now reaching an heroic period of New Jersey's 
history, and scenes must be portrayed in which the men of Som- 
erset are to play a no imimportant part. Even before the time 
of the death of Johannes, the people of the American provinces 
began to be apprehensive that living the life of colonial depend- 
ence on the British crown was not to be altogether one of 
unmixed peace and prosperity. Most irritating measures, sub- 
versive to the rights of Americans, were constantly being intro- 
duced in parliament by the Tory element of that body, and taxa- 
tion without representation seemed to be the policy of the British 
rulers. From the granite-ribbed hills of Massachusetts to the 
sandy levels of Georgia the sentiment of the people was pro- 
nounced and unanimous against so unjust a treatment, and the 
tocsin of liberty began to be sounded throughout the length and 
breadth of the land. By 1763 Benjamin Franklin had already 
declared that he would cheerfully be willing to spend nineteen 
shillings on the pound to test the king's right to take the other 
shilling in unlawful taxes ; — a sentiment that received endorse- 
ment from the entire country. But, in spite of the earnest 
remonstrances of the colonies, two years later parliament passed 
the obnoxious stamp act. 

At once from Boston to Savannah could be heard the 
tumultuous indignation of the populace, which voiced a 
unanimity of feeling. Spirited resolutions, similar in their 
character, were passed by both the Virginia and Massa- 
chusetts assemblies, the latter calling for a congress of the col- 
onies. On every side were to be heard the mutterings that pre- 
ceded the storm of the Revolution. In New York city, by the 
autumn of 1765, vast processions, under the leadership of the 
popular Isaac Sears, were marching and counter-marching, pro- 
claiming by shout, image and caricature the opposition of the 
citizens to the stamp act. The coach-house of the royal gover- 
nor was forcibly entered, and his state carriage was forced to the 
service of carrying through tiie town images intended to repre- 
sent devils, after which, with his other carriages and sleighs, it 
was burned in the presence of the British garrison. Just at that 
time it would seem that public opinion condemned the display of 
fine equipage ; previous to the Revolution there were probably 
not over ten coaches in the city. One was owned by Robert 



282 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Murray, a Quaker merchant, whose country-place was between 
Thirty-sixth and Fortieth streets and Fourth and Fifth avenues ; 
so great was the prejudice against these aristocratic vehicles 
that he called his a " leathern conveniency." 

New Jersey was not behind the other provinces in an attitude 
of hostility to Great Britain's encroachments on the constitutional 
rights of her citizens. To her belongs the distinction of issuing 
the first Revolutionary newspaper — the " Constitutional Cour- 
ant." It was published by Andrew Marvel on the twenty -first 
of September, 1765, at Burlington at the sign of the '' Bribe 
Refused on Constitution Hill, North America." The streets of 
New York were soon flooded with copies, whereby the agitations 
of the hour were much increased, but as it was outspoken in 
denouncing the arbitrary measures of parliament the government 
quickly interfered, suppressing its sale, and no more numbers 
were issued. William Coxe, who had been appointed by the 
Crown stamp officer for New Jersey, was threatened Avith viol- 
ence, resulting in his resignation in September ; indeed, by th6 
first of November, when the odious act was to go into operation, 
it was fomid that the stamp agents in all the colonies had retired 
from their positions, and no one was left with authority to exe- 
cuto the law. A congress of delegates from the provinces 
having met in New York in October, a declaration of rights, a 
memorial to parliament and a petition to the king were dis- 
patched to England. This action, together with the assiduity of 
Benjamin Franklin — who was then representing Pennsylvania in 
London — and the advocacy of liberty -loving members of the house 
of commons, resulted on the eighteenth of March in the repeal of 
th e stamp act. The feeling of relief throughout the country was 
in tense. As was said by Colonel Lambert Cadwalader, a native 
of Trenton and a distinguished patriot : " The joj'ful news almost 
calls back youth to the aged, gives health and vigor to the sick 
and infirm." 

America was again thought to be free; the people settled 
doAvn to their ordinary avocations with the hope that they no 
longer need fear the invasion of their liberties. A fancied 
security. It was not long before the citizens found they had 
new cause for grievance against the home government. The 
feeling of uneasiness gradually increased, as the march of events 



MUTTERINGS OV THE StORM. 283 

showed conclusively that the policy of Great Britain was to be 
one of forcing the collection from the colonists of a revenue, with- 
out giving them representation or the right of directing their 
own affairs. The flame ignited by the stamp act had never been 
entirely subdued, but still slumbered and smouldered beneath 
the surface, fed by continued aggressions. The passage of the 
Boston port bill in March, 1774, gave it new life ; and indigna- 
tion and protest were again ablaze from Maine to Greorgia. In 
the light of subsequent history it appears most extraordinary 
that parliament should persistently have continued to pursue a 
policy which the most ordinary statesmanship, it would seem, 
should have divined must inevitably result in the loss of Eng- 
land's most precious colonial possessions. Ill-advised politicians, 
notwithstanding the warning oratory of Chatham and other far- 
seeing legislators, continued to pile up the fuel of revenue bills, 
tea duties and other unjust acts, until at last, in their madness, 
they applied the torch of coercion, starting a conflagration which 
was only quenched by a deluge of blood, which cut off from Great 
Britain three million of subjects, and increased the public debt 
by one hundred and twenty millions. 

We have now reached a time when the mutterings of the 
coming storm could plainly be heard as an angry hum of distrust 
and resentment. The colonists were rapidly losing their loy- 
alty to, and affection for, the mother country. The people of 
the different provinces seemed of one mind; without concerted 
action, and almost without correspondence, they held informal 
meetings, and formed self-constituted committees for the purpose 
of obtaining intelligence, and of advising with the inhabitants of 
other colonies as to what means should be employed to prevent 
further encroachments on the vested rights and liberties of the 
king's subjects in America. In New Jersey a general 
committee of correspondence had been appointed by the pro- 
vincial assembly in February, 1774, composed of nine members. 
Their duties at flrst seem to have been confined to corresponding 
and consulting with prominent citizens of the different counties in 
order to insure a unanimity of sentiment and action when the 
time should come for the people to assert their individual and 
collective rights. The committee met on the first of June in 
New Brunswick, when by letter to the people in Massachusetts 



284 The Story of an Old Farm. 

they pledged the citizens of New Jersey to act in concert with 
the other colonies in whatever steps should be generally agreed 
upon. They also called upon Governor William Franklin to 
convene the provincial assembly before the first of August. 
This the executive declined to do, giving as a reason, "there 
is no public business of the province which can make such a 
meeting necessary." 

During the months of June and July, a series of meetings 
were held in the several counties of New Jersey for the purpose 
of organizing for defence, and for choosing deputies to represent 
the province in a continental congress, which had been called 
to meet in the following September. The resolutions passed at 
the different meetings were much of the same character. They 
bound the citizens to act in conjunction with those of other 
counties in any measures that might be decided upon insuring 
the happiness and safety of the people. They were unanimous 
in expressing the sentiment that the sufferings and injustice vis- 
ited upon the people of Boston by Great Britain should be a 
common cause of grievance for the inhabitants of the entire con- 
tinent ; and that the rights and privileges of America should be 
protected, even though necessitating the adoption of the most 
severe and extreme measures. 

Permanent committees of correspondence were appointed, 
and directed to meet in a state convention for the pur- 
pose of appointing delegates to the proposed congress. The 
committees convened on the twenty-first of July, 1774, in 
New Brunswick, holding a three days session. The sev- 
enty-two members present, by their resolution, recognized 
and acknowledged King George III. to be their rightful and law- 
ful sovereign to whom they owed and promised faithful alle- 
giance. They declined, however, to recognize the right of the 
British parliament, in which they had no representation, to make 
laws for, or impose taxes on, the king's American subjects. 
They boimd themselves to oppose with all the legal and rightful 
means in their power all unconstitutional and oppressive meas- 
ures of that body, which might be considered dangerous and 
destructive to the colonies. They advised the appointment of a 
general congress of committees of the respective colonies, who 
should have power to pledge the public honor and faith in all 



A Historic Ride. 285 

efforts that should be made to redress the wrongs of the peo- 
ple. 

The meeting of this first continental congress at Philadelphia 
in September, 1774, is a matter of history. It was a fairly 
representative body, the delegates having been chosen from 
among all classes of the people. The proceedings were opened 
by its president, Peyton Randolph, of Virginia. He was followed 
by a man of the people — Patrick Henry — who spoke as " Homer 
wrote." Moved by the fire of genius his tall, awkward figure 
grew majestic as he exclaimed : ''I am not a Virginian, but an 
American!" When he took his seat it is said that there was no 
longer any doubt that he was the greatest of American orators, 
and ranked among the ablest champions of constitutional liberty 
in America. He and George Washington, mounted on thorough- 
breds, had travelled together to Philadelphia from the " Old 
Dominion." A historic journey ! Picture to yourself these 
illustrious men riding side by side ; the opulent planter with a 
mature mind of almost unequalled sagacity and comprehensive- 
ness, and the plain county lawyer with already a national repu- 
tation as a political thinker ; picture them slowly traversing the 
Virginia woods, cantering over the swells and swales of Mary- 
land, fording the rapidly running streams, and climbing Penn- 
sylvania's rugged ridges. As they reasoned together of the 
dangers threatening the country, could their saddle-talk have 
been preserved, what a contribution it would now be to our 
knowledge of the springs that fed the patriotic currents of 
thought animating the hearts and actions of these heroic Vir- 
ginians. 

It is hardly necessary to refer to the debates and resolutions 
of the members of this first continental congress ; neither need we 
enlarge upon the elaborate exposition that was drawn of the 
rights of the king's subjects in America, or upon the favorable 
statements of the wrongs for which the colonists demanded 
redress from Great Britain. Suffice it to say that it was recom- 
mended that during the winter throughout the colonies township 
meetings should be held, when a more direct appeal to the people 
could be made, and a more general expression of their sentiments 
obtained. Following this suggestion of congress, meetings in the 
several townships in New Jersey were held, at which committees 



286 The Story of an Old Farm. 

of observation and inspection were appointed. The members of 
these township committees then met in each county, and by a 
majority vote chose a county committee of correspondence. In 
my possession is a saffron-colored, time-disfigured, original paper 
containing what appears to be a concise digest of the minutes of 
the first four meetings of the Bedminster committee of observa- 
tion and inspection, together with the expenses incurred thereat. 
The person who penned this document may have been a patriot, 
but his spelling was woful. The paper, however, is interesting 
and valuable as showing the members of the committee to have 
been Stephen Hunt, Aaron Malick, Guisbert Sutphen, John 

Wortman, John Voorhees, Gaston and Lane (probably 

Matthew). 

We have already learned something of some of the men form- 
ing this committee — of Hunt, as owner of the mill on Peapack 
brook ; of Sutphen, as active in the congregation of the Bedmin- 
ster church ; of Wortman, as one of the earliest settlers 
at Pluckamin. This last member was also a justice of the 
peace and the first blacksmith in the village. It was not long 
before his activity in the popular cause brought upon him the 
distinction of having a price set upon his rebel head by the enemy. 
The squire, as he was called, told in after years with much 
pride that he had not only entertained Washington at his own 
table, but had shod his horses with his own hands. Matthew 
Lane, it is believed at this time lived in the old dwelling known 
as the Fenner house, and lately occupied by Mrs. Sarah Harmer. 
He was a merchant, and in 1787 Pluckamin's leading store- 
keeper ; his store adjoined his residence, which continues to 
this day to bear many of its original Revolutionary characteris- 
tics. He was the nephew of Guisbert Sutphen, and the son of 
Matthias Lane, who came from Monmouth county in 1745, and 
purchased three hundred acres of land east of Van Vleet's mills, 
a portion of which is still in the possession of his descendants. 
John Voorhees was an associate of Aaron Malick, and was a 
well-to-do farmer living on the road running from the Larger 
Cross Roads to Peapack. At his death in 1807 Aaron was one 
of the administrators of his estate. He was a deacon of the Bed- 
minster Reformed Dutch church. 

At two o'clock on the moniing of the twenty-fourth of April, 



First Provincial Congress. 287 

1775, the Middlesex committee of correspondence received at 
New Brunswick a despatch from the New York committee 
announcing that the battle of Lexington had occurred on the 
nineteenth instant. The committee endorsed this message, and 
the express-rider flew on to Princeton, thence to Trenton, and 
on to Philadelphia, reaching there at nine A. M. on the twenty- 
fifth, having been one hour less than six days in coming froin 
Watertown, Massachusetts, including stops at all the principal 
places on the way. The country was, of course, in a blaze of 
excitement. No truer prophecy was ever uttered than that 
ejaculated in broken tones by pastor Jonas Clark of Lexington, 
over the lifeless forms of his seven parishioners that the British 
volley had stretched at his church door on the village green : 
" From this day will be dated the liberty of the world." It was 
now no longer the mutterings but the storm itself that the people 
of New Jersey were forced to face. For months the black clouds 
of strife and dissension had been slowly and surely rolling on, 
enshrouding the land in gloom and apprehension ; now the citi- 
zens awoke to the realization that civil war with its attendant 
horrors was to be the heritage of their generation. 

The general committee of correspondence, which had been 
appointed by the convention of the preceding July, was at 
once convened, meeting at New Brunswick on the second day 
of May, 1775. It directed the chairman to call a provincial 
congress for the twenty -third instant, and it desired the scA^eral 
counties to speedily appoint their respective deputies. This sec- 
ond convention or provincial congress met at Trenton on the 
twenty-third of May, remaining in session for eleven days. Its 
president, Hendrick Fisher ; its secretary, Jonathan D. Sergeant, 
and its assistant secretaries, William Patterson and Frederick 
Frelinghuysen, were chosen from among the Somerset dele- 
gates. President Fisher was ripe in years and experience, 
having been born in Germany in 1697. Though by rea- 
son of strength he had long since passed the allotted span of life, 
he was as ardent in the cause of the colonies as was the 
most devoted of the younger New Jersey patriots. When the 
parliamentary aggressions forced the province into an atti- 
tude of opposition to the British government, he was a member 
of the colonial assembly and at once became conspicuous among 



288 The Story of an Old Farm. 

his fellows as a champion of liberty. From that time until his 
death in 1779, he was active in his duties of serving the 
people. Mr. Fisher was a forcible debater and exerted an 
important influence in the deliberations of the provincial 
assemblies, and in those of the many executive committees of 
which he was a member. In Domine John Frelinghuysen's 
time he was a helper and lay-preacher in the Raritan church, 
and some of his sermons are reported to have been rich in doc- 
trine, and in their illustrations of spirtual Christianity. His 
home was on the south side of the Raritan river, a little below 
Bound Brook, on a property lately owned by Abraham I. 
Brokaw, and there he is buried in a little family graveyard over- 
groAvn with a thicket of thorns and small bushes. 

In this congress youth and old age joined hands in presenting 
an undaunted front to those who proposed warring against 
the rights of the colonies. Assistant-secretary Frelinghuysen, 
who has ali'eady been referred to as the son of Domine John 
Frelinghuysen, was barely twenty-two years old. During this 
same year he represented the province in the continental con- 
gress, and his name often appears in Somerset annals among 
its soldiers and statesmen. We shall find him doing excellent 
service at the battles of Trenton, Princeton and Monmouth, and 
he was appointed major-general and commander-in-chief of New 
Jersey and Pennsylvania troops for the western expedition, dur- 
ing Washington's presidency. At the bar of the state he 
stood among the first, and when he died in 1804, lamented 
by his country, he left to his posterity the legacy of an 
illustrious career and an unsullied record. Those familiar 
with the name of Frelinghuysen — and who in New Jersey 
are not ? — know that many of his talents and virtues were 
transmitted to his children and grandchildren. Jonathan D. 
Sergeant was another son of Somerset of whom any 
county might with good reason be proud. He was a resid- 
ent of Princeton, having been born there in 1746, his mother 
being the daughter of the Reverend Jonathan Dickinson, 
of Elizabeth town. He studied for the bar with Richard Stock- 
ton the elder, and became distinguished as a lawyer, and 
eminent in public aff"airs. In 1778 he removed to Philadelphia, 
and was soon chosen attorney-general of Pennsylvania. In 1793, 



Arming for the Fray. 289 

he died of yellow fever, falling in the cause of humanity. When 
most of the population of Philadelphia fled in terror from that 
disease-stricken city, he with a few other equally noble souls 
faced the danger, and remained to assist and relieve the sick and 
destitute. 

This congress, recognizing the impending conflict, proceeded 
to put the colony on a war footing by passing a militia bill, 
which boldly declared it to be " highly necessary that the inhabi- 
tants of the Province be forthwith properly armed and disci- 
plined for defending the cause of American Freedom." An 
ordinance was also passed laying a war tax of ten thousand 
pounds, proclamation money, of which Somerset's proportion was 
about nine hundred pounds. Other provinces, and the second 
continental congress then in session, were notified of the steps 
taken by New Jersey ; and before adjourning a new committee 
of correspondence was appointed, which included Fisher and 
Frelinghuysen. This committee was directed to instruct the 
sub-county committees to secure the signatures of the inhabi- 
tants to articles of association of a form adopted by the 
provincial congress. These articles pledged every person to 
support and carry into execution whatever measures might be 
recommended by the continental and provincial congresses. 

With the session of this first provincial congress then sitting 
at Trenton it would appear that the Bedminster committee of 
observation and inspection had business, as in its minutes before 
referred to is the following entry : — 

May 25, 1775, John Wortman and gisbert Sutphen when sent to the Congress 
at trintown, out two Days & Expence of going 5s. 3d. & at trentown 9s. 7d. Return- 
ing 5s. 3d. in all .Sutphen payd on the above 17s. 5d. John wortman 2s. 8d. — 
John wortmans to the Ride of his horse to trintown 3s. 9d. Gisbert Sutphen for 
his horse 3s. 9d. Included in the above. 

At the same meeting the following minute was made : — 

Mr. Hunt has payd to the man that Came from Brunswick to train the 
men £0. 4s. 8d. 

While the people in all parts of New Jersey were quick to 
respond to the recommendations of congress that they should 
arm and discipline themselves for defense, it would seem that 
Somerset county took the lead in putting muskets in the hands of 
its citizens. The " Pennsylvania Packet " of the twelfth of June 
states that: — 
19 



290 The Story of an Old Faum. 

The martial spirit whicli prevails among the inhabitants of Somerset county, 
in New Jersey, truly merits the attention of the public. We have certain intel- 
ligence that they are forming themselves into companies, and daily exercising, to 
become complete masters of the military discipline; and particularly, that the 
township of Bridgewater, in said county, met at Raritan, the sixth instant, and 
chose Mr. Abraham Ten Eyck, captain, under whose command eighty-live vol- 
unteers immediately enlisted, to be in readiness at an hour's warning, to march 
for the assistance of any neighboring colony, on any emergency. Their pay and 
other necessaries are provided by said townsiiip. The other counties and town- 
ships, it is hoped, will follow their example, as it may be necessary to repel 
force by force, in order to secure our national rights and privileges. 

Bedminster did not need the example of Bridgewater to fan 
the flame of patriotism ; for its men had ah'eady taken the 
initiative, and were arming for the fray. They had even antici- 
pated the action of the provincial congress of the twenty-third of 
May, as is shown by the following minute made at a meeting of 
its committee of observation and inspection held on the eigh- 
teenth of May, at the house of Anthony J. Jacobs : — 

Borrowed from John Wortman in cash £2. Os. (kl. to Gow to new york to Buy 
arms [tiiree words blurred] Stephen Hunt chosen to go to new york to Buy 
the arms. 

At another meeting, " when the Company met to Rase men,^^ 
the minutes show that it was agreed •' tliat the Captain shall 
have one Dollar per Day to treat his men when he trains his 
men that once a wick." This meeting was held on the twentieth 
of May " at the house of John phoenix " — probably at the tavern 
at the Lager Cross Roads, kept during the Revolution by John 
Sutphen, who married John Phoenix's daughter, Sarah. It 
stood on the site where is now tlie dwelling of David Dunham, 
and Washington and his generals, in passing westward through 
the township, always made it their stopping place. Sarah 
Phoenix used to tell her grandchildren that when the army 
marched through the Larger Cross Roads, open house was kept 
for the continental officers, and that she distinctly remembered 
General Washington's reserved and absent demeanor one day 
at dinner, while Generals Knox, Wayne, and others were 
inclined to be merry over their wines and desserts. 

Among the many duties of the committee of observation and 
inspection, not the least arduous one was that of securing guns, 
powder and ball. As early as in October, 1774, the British 
ministry instructed all the royal governors to seize whatever 



Lead a Precious Metal. 291 

arms and ammunition might be imported into their provinces. 
Munitions of war were consequently scarce ; after the supplies 
of the cities of New York and Philadelphia were exhausted 
it became necessary for the members of the committee to ran- 
sack the country, and purchase of farmers, mechanics, and 
others, old muskets, shotguns and firelocks of every description. 
Those out of order were sent to be made serviceable to the gun- 
smiths, Henry Watkey and Joseph Robinson at New Brunswick, 
and to Lebbeus Dodd at Mendham who before and during the 
Revolution repaired all the guns and made all the clocks for that 
part of the country. The raw material for bullets was more 
easily obtained, although the people were forced to make many 
personal sacrifices in order to comply with the requirements of 
the hour. The provincial congress had directed the township 
committees " to collect all the leaden weights from windows and 
clocks, all leaden weights of shops, stores, and mills, of one pound 
weight and upwards ; also all the lead in and about houses and 
other places." Commissioners were appointed to receive the 
same from the committees, paying therefor sixpence per pound, 
proclamation money, together with expenses. Bedminster was 
soon denuded of what had suddenly grown to be considered a 
precious metal, many of the families even cheerfully sacrificing 
their pewter dishes and platters, which were much valued by 
colonial housewives. 

The next session of the provincial congress convened on the 
fifth of August, continuing until the seventeenth instant. Since 
the adjournment important events had rapidly followed each 
other. The British force in Boston had been augmented ; the 
battle of Bunker Hill had been fought on the seventeenth of 
June ; Washington, having been appointed commander-in-chief, 
had already drawn his sword under the great elm on Cambridge 
common, his army being composed of fourteen thousand five 
hundred militia, without uniformity in discipline, subordination, 
arms, dress or organization. On the twenty-eighth of June JSir 
Henry Clinton's land force of three thousand men and Sir Peter 
Parker's fleet of ten frigates and gun-ships, after fighting two 
hours and throwing fifty tons of shot, had been repulsed at 
Charleston with the loss of a frigate and one hundred and 
seventy men. All this had brought the colonists to a full realiza- 



292 



The Story of an Old Farm. 



tion that they were involved in the miseries of civil strife, hwit 
little or no probability of an accommodation with what had 
always been considered the home government, until the ques- 
tions at issue had been arbitrated by many bloody conflicts. The 
deputies proceeded to deliberate upon the condition of the coun- 
try, and to pass such ordinances as the gravity of the situation 
demanded : one to increase the effectiveness of the militia ; one 
for the more thorough establishment of the civil government ; 
one to insure the more prompt collection of the war tax ; and 
others of equal importance. A " committee of safety " was 
appointed, which during the recess of congress was to possess 
much of the powers of that body. Among its' members were 
Frederick Frelinghuysen, Hendrick Fisher, Jonathan D. Ser- 
geant, Peter Schenck and Enos Kelsey, all of Somerset. The 
authority of this committee was almost dictatorial, its members 
were appointed by successive provincial congresses, and in a 
majority of their votes were vested general powers for the 
security and defence of the colony. It continued in existence 
until October, 1776, which was the date of the first meeting of 
the legislature under the state constitution. After that time the 
governor and a " council of safety " (composed of twenty mem- 
bers) were invested with requisite authority to act during the 
intervals between meetings of the legislature. 




CHAPTER XXI. 

The Declaration of Independence and the Overthrow of the 
Provificial Government — The Arrest of the Royal Governor^ 
William FranJclin. 

The most important of New Jersey's provincial congresses, and 
the final one for the year 1775, opened on the third of October 
and continued for twenty-two days. Its members had been 
elected by the people, the previous bodies having been provis- 
ional in character, the delegates emanating from the choice of 
informal county meetings or conventions. The amount of busi- 
ness transacted at this session was very great. The whole col- 
ony was in a state of intense agitation, and excitements ruled 
the hour. It was a time of civil discord, when neighbor feared 
neighbor and friend suspected friend. Disputes and difficulties 
between the people were rife, culminating in all manner of 
charges and complaints, which were poured in upon congress in 
the shape of accusations, petitions and appeals. Communications 
from township and county committees had to be received and 
deliberated upon, charges against loyalists investigated, and many 
complaints of personal grievances considered. 

Ordinances were passed for the raising of regiments, the 
strengthening of the militia, the purchase of munitions of war, 
and, to meet the many pecuniary necessities of the hour, arrange- 
ments were effected for the issue of bills of credit to the amount 
of thirty thousand pounds, proclamation money. But we will 
not speak in detail of all the important matters that were- 
patiently and ably considered by this patriotic congress, among- 
whose officers were Samuel Tucker of Hunterdon, as president^ 
and John Mehelm of Hunterdon and Hendrick F'isher of Somer- 
set, as vice-presidents. It is enough for us to know that at u 



294 The Stoky of an Old Farm. 

period when legislative difficulties of the most involved character 
had to be encountered, these deputies conducted their delibera- 
tions with wisdom and prudence, and by their intelligent and 
far-seeing devotion to the best interests of the colony laid a firm 
foundation upon which was afterward raised the superstructure 
of a great state. This important session adjourned to meet at 
New Brimswick on the first Tuesday in April, 1776. One of its 
final acts was to appoint a committee of safety to govern the 
province ad interim^ among whom were Samuel Tucker, John 
Hart and John Mehelm of Hunterdon, Hendrick Fisher and 
Kuloff Van Dyke of Somerset. 

All this time the second continental congress, which had 
convened on the tenth of May, was in session, and in constant 
communication with the congresses and committees of the sev- 
eral provinces. It is unnecessary to speak in detail of the many 
important measures that were ably considered by this celebrated 
legislature, or of the ardor of its patriotic members whose soul- 
stirring debates in the historic State House at Philadelphia stiU 
arouse the enthusiasm of mankind, the wide world over. Wher- 
ever the name of liberty is known and loved, the broad compre- 
hensive views and deep political knowledge exhibited by the 
many distinguished men composing this congress, have been rec- 
ognized and extolled. Since the formation of society the record 
of no other representative body contributes pages of such value 
and brilliancy to the history of the cause of human progress. We 
should be false, however, to the continuity of the story of the 
times did we fail to note that by early June in 1776 Richard 
Henry Lee of Virginia had submitted a motion, declaring the 
colonies to be " absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, 
and that all connection between them and Great Britain is, and 
ought to be, dissolved." This was but anticipatory of the cul- 
minating act of the memorable second day of July which saw the 
final adoption, without a dissenting voice, of that resolution for 
independence which was to insure a name and a national exist- 
ence to the United States of America. 

The second of July Avas, therefore, the momentous day on 
which was broken the last political link binding the colonies and 
the mother country. A committee was at once appointed to 
draft a declaration of reasons justifying this all-important step 



WiTiiERSPOON IN Congress. 295 

taken by the delegates. Two days later, on the morning of the 
fourth, Thomas Jefferson as chairman of that committee pre- 
sented to the continental congress the immortal Declaration of 
Independence. Among the illustrious men who listened to the 
reading of this document there is one figm'e that stands sharply 
defined on the canvas which portrays the scene of the crowning 
act of this historic body. It is that of John Witherspoon, a 
distinguished representative from New Jersey, whose patriotism 
and foresight at a crucial moment is believed to have powerfully 
promoted the prompt acceptance of the Declaration of Independ- 
ence. After Jefferson had finished the reading of this paper, 
the members of congress were appalled by the solemnity of the 
occasion, and by the apparent realization for the first time of the 
portent of the document. The knowledge seemed suddenly 
forced upon them of what its adoption must entail upon the 
country. It meant a continuation of the war, and all the miser- 
ies that would necessarily follow a prolonged civil conflict. 
Should the American arms not prevail, complete subjection of the 
entire people must follow, and for the signers and promulgators 
of this incendiary and rebellious instrument naught could be 
expected but an ignominious death. Through the halls of con- 
gress an intense silence prevailed. It was a critical moment. 
When the painful hush shoidd be broken the temper of the first 
speaker might decide the weal or woe of the people. As has 
been said by a witness : " The very destiny of the country 
seemed to be suspended upon the action of a moment." 

Suddenly a stalwart form arose — that of a man full of years ; 
his hair whitened by the snows of many winters. With a coun- 
tenance resolute and determined, and a voice trembling with the 
intensity of his emotions, he broke the deep silence of the chamber: 
" There is," said he, " a tide in the affairs of man, a nick of 
time; we perceive it now before us. The noble instrument upon 
your table, which insures immortality to its author, should be 
subscribed this very morning by every pen in the house. He 
who will not respond to its accents, and strain every nerve to 
carry into effect its provisions, is unworthy the name of a free- 
man. Although these gray hairs must descend into the sepul- 
chre, I would infinitely rather they should descend thither by 
the hand of the public executioner than desert, at this time, the 



296 The Story of an Old Farm. 

sacred cause of my country." The speaker sat down, and a 
great sigh of relief and murmur of approval went up from his 
listeners — the tension was over, the crisis safely passed. In the 
debates which followed, the speeches of the members displayed 
much of the spirit of patriotic firmness that had characterized 
the timely appeal of this excellent man, resulting finally in the 
adoption of that portentous document * which secured the inde- 
pendence of the thirteen states. 

John Witherspoon was a Scotch divine who in 1768 had 
been called to the presidency of the College of New Jersey, 
and to the pastorate of the Presbyterian church in Prince- 
ton. This was not his first appearance in the arena of rebel- 
lion. When the Highlanders flocked to the royal standard 
unfurled by the young pretender in the north of Scotland, 
Witherspoon, though the pastor of a parish, raised a corps 
of militia and marched to his support. The young parson- 
soldier's enthusiasm carried him into the battle of Falkirk, where 
he was taken prisoner ; he lay captive in the castle of Donne 
until after Culloden. In America he proved a patriot of great 
influence in the councils of the nation, and served the state in 
congress with honor and ability for six years, and in 1776 was 
also a member of the provincial congress, afterwards the " Con- 
vention of the State of New Jersey." As a Princeton resident, we 
may fairly claim Doctor Witherspoon to have been a Somerset man ; 
it was many years after that time before the county was shorn of 
its southern border which then included that seat of learning, in 
order to contribute to the new county of Mercer. 

It must be remembered that until early in 1770 the semblance 
of royal government continued to exist in New Jersey. Up to 

*The declaration signed that day is not the venerable parchment now so 
carefully preserved in tiie state department at Washington. This latter docu- 
ment was subsecjuently engrossed, and it was not for many months afterward 
that all of its appended signatures were thereon inscribed. Indeed a number 
of its signers, among them Charles Carroll and Dr. Benjamin Rush, were 
not even members of congress on the fourth of July, 1776, but were elected dele- 
gates some weeks later. The original declaration has not been preserved and 
may possibly have been destroyed by order of congress. Much interesting, and 
what to many would be considered new, information regarding the adoption of 
the Declaration of Independence, is to be found in a paper by William L. 
Stone in Harper's Magazine, Vol. LXVII., p. 208. The Witherspoon incident 
is given in Alexander Graydon's " Memoirs of His Own Times." 



Provincial Congresses of 1776. 297 

the fourth of July all official documents and proclamations ended 
with the phrase, '^ God save the King." At this time, with the 
exception of that grand old "Rebel Governor," Jonathan Trum- 
bull of Connecticut, there was not in aU the thirteen colonies a 
chief magistrate but that was strongly prejudiced in favor of 
British interests, and zealous to check the uprising of the people. 
Governor William Franklin occupied the proprietor's house at 
Perth Amboy — yet extant, and used as a home for aged Pres- 
byterian ministers. His duties mainly consisted in keeping his 
government advised as to the treasonable acts of the citizens. 
The colonial assembly still had a legal existence, though the 
house had been prorogued by the governor on the sixth of 
December, 1775, until the third of January, 1776 ; it never 
reassembled ', and thus terminated the colonial legislature of New 
Jersey. 

The provincial congress of 1776 met on the first of Febru- 
ary at New Brunswick ; owing to the exigency of the times 
it was convened by the council of safety before the date to 
which the previous congress had adjourned. The business 
before this session was largely composed of following the sugges- 
tions made by continental congress as to the raising and equip- 
ping of regular battalions, and for supplying the province's 
portion of the munitions of war. Among the many ordinances 
passed was one making radical changes in the franchise 
laws, whereby all persons who had lived one year in the 
county, were worth fifty pounds in personal estate, and had 
signed the articles of association prepared by the township 
committees of observation and inspection, were entitled 
to vote for deputies. The first election under this ordinance 
took place in May, 1776, and the deputies chosen from Som- 
erset were Frederick Frelinghuysen, William Paterson, John 
Witherspoon (also member of continental congress), Jacob 
R. Hardenbergh (pastor of the Raritan Reformed Dutch 
churches), and James Linn. Judge James Linn was one of 
Somerset's aristocrats and a citizen highly esteemed throughout 
the country. He lived on a well improved plantation of six 
hundred acres, lying in the Mine brook valley in Bernards town- 
ship, about one mile east of the village of Bedminster. He had 
quite a retinue of servants and twenty slaves. His estate had 



298 The Story of an Old Farm. 

been inherited from his father ; on it he continued to live as 
one of the first gentlemen of the county until 1810. 

On Monday, the tenth of June, this most important of all of New- 
Jersey's provincial congresses met at Burlington. Its sessions con- 
tinued until the twenty-first of August, though twice adjourned, 
the first time to Trenton and the second to New Brunswick. This 
congress enacted all laws for a time in the name of the colony, 
but, having on the second of July adopted a state constitution, 
on the' eighteenth of the same month it assumed the title 
of the " Convention of the State of New Jersey," thus 
giving birth to a free and independent commonwealth. 
Another act of this body distinguishing it above all preceding 
congresses was the deposition of the royal governor. As has 
been said before, the semblance of kingly power still continued 
in New Jersey. In addition to the representative of the crown, 
the king's council still had an existence, though sKorn of some 
of Its members by their disaffection. Among these was Lord 
Stirling of Somerset, who had been suspended by the governor 
in September, 1775, because of having accepted a military com- 
mission from the provincial congress. 

There is no doubt that the greater part of Governor Franklin's 
administration was much to the advantage of the colony, as he 
fostered and encouraged many enterprises that promoted its pros- 
perity. Could the people of New Jersey forget his subsequent con- 
duct as a vindictive loyalist, they would be better able to look 
back upon his government with respect, and appreciate that 
during his long administration, for much of the time he dis- 
played a commendable desire for the welfare of the prov- 
ince. Such without doubt is his record, and we may even 
accord to him sincerity of opinion and purpose in identifying 
himself with those who were endeavoring to sacrifice the liberties 
of the country. But with the dissensions that arose between the 
executive and the citizens, he is said to have become petidant 
and unwise. As the people grew to be alert in regard to every 
question touching their rights, his arrogance increased, and he 
rapidly became destitute of prudence and self-control. In the 
provincial assembly he made great endeavors to defeat the ratifi- 
cation of the actions of the first continental congress, and from 
that time up to his deposition was but little more than a spy for 
the public enemy. 



Governor William Franklin's Record. 299 

As has been said on a former page, the governor was a son of 
Benjamin Franklin, — the natural son, for who was his mother is 
not known. The date of his birth — 1730 — was one year pre- 
vious to that of his father's marriage. He was taken home bj 
Benjamin Franklin and reared and educated as though bom in 
wedlock. The New Jersey people, who well knew of this bar 
sinister on the Franklin escutcheon, were much chagrined ou 
learning in 1762 who was to be their new governor. John 
Penn, one of the proprietors of Pennsylvania and the son of its 
founder, wrote to Lord Stirling from England in September of 
that year that he thought it a dishonor and a disgrace to have 
such a man at the head of the government ; and that he hoped 
that some effort would be made before his Jersey friends would 
put up with such an insult. This letter was written from Stoke- 
Park. The manor adjoins that little ivy-clad church which 
since Gray wrote his imperishable elegy has been an interna- 
tional shrine. But few of its many American pilgrims, as they 
leave the highway and follow the little footpath leading across 
Stoke-Park to Stoke-Pogis churchyard, know that the fortune 
that established this handsome English seat had its origin on the 
banks of the Delaware. 

William Franklin, just after being appointed governor 
of New Jersey, was married in St. George's church, Hanover 
square, London, to Miss Elizabeth Downe. Strange as 
the coincidence may be, he, too, had an illegitimate son, 
born two years before. As had done his father, so did he ; 
naming the child William Temple Franklin he took him home 
to his bride, and the boy was reared with as much solicitude as 
if the offspring of marriage. Benjamin Franklin grieved much 
over the failure of his son to espouse the cause of the colonists. 
He wrote " that nothing had ever affected him with such keen 
sensitiveness as to find himself deserted in his old age by his 
only son ; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up arms 
against him in a cause wherein his good fame, fortune and life 
were at stake." The grandson was a warm adherent of the 
Americans, and, deserting his father, allied his fortimes to those 
of his grandfather, with whom he remained associated until his 
death. He subsequently wrote a biography of Doctor Franklin, 
and died in France in 1823. 



300 The Story of an Old Farm. 

The prestige and patriotism of the governor's father caused 
the people to judge leniently of the attitude the son assumed 
toward the cause so dear to the popidar heart ; this, too, 
at a time when loyalists were looked upon with extreme dis- 
favor. But, as the months rolled on, his pronounced acts in 
support of the British ministry were too great for the forbearance 
of the people in their newly-born sovereign capacity. An inter- 
cepted despatch in January, 1776, had led to Lord Stirling's 
placing him under arrest, and on parole. For some months he 
continued to occupy the gubernatorial residence at Perth Amboy, 
and to nominally direct the affiiirs of the province, but having 
called upon the old assembly to meet on the twentieth of June, 
the provincial congress declared this to be in direct contempt of 
the orders of the continental congress. On the fifteenth of June 
William Livingston, John Witherspoon, William Paterson and 
John Mehelm were appointed a committee to cause the arrest of 
the governor, and to depose him from office. Colonel Nathaniel 
Heard, commanding the 1st Middlesex battalion, under the 
direction of this committee made the arrest, and the governor 
was brought before provincial congress under guard. He 
treated that body with great indignity ; did not hesitate to charge 
its members with being low-bred men who deserved to be hung 
as rebels, and declared them to be without sufficient education for 
devising or carrying out plans for the public weal. When he 
had finished his violent tirade, Doctor Witherspoon sprang to his 
feet and fixing his keen eyes upon the king's representative 
poured on him a copious stream of irony, delivering a " rebidte 
so withering as to cause the boldest to hold his breath with 
astonishment." In concluding, after referring to Franklin's illi- 
gitimacy, he said : — 

On the whole, Mr. President, I think that the governor has made us a speech 
every way worthy of his exalted birth and refined educjition. 

Acting under the advice of Washington it was decided by 
congress to transfer the deposed executive to the keeping of 
Governor Trumbull of Connecticut, whereupon Franklin was 
confined in a house in East Windsor. Here he remained a pris- 
oner for two years ; upon being exchanged, he established him- 
self in New York which continued to be his home until 1782, 
when he returned to England. To cover his losses the British 



Some New Jersey Patriots. 301 

government allowed him the smn of eighteen hundred pounds 
and an annual pension of eight hundred pounds. William Liv- 
ingston was appointed governor in his stead, a position which he 
ably filled, owing to repeated re-elections, until the year 1782. * 

It will be noticed that deputies of the provincial congress were 
always inclined to call upon men of Somerset to occupy leading 
positions in their body, or to carry out their most important meas- 
ures. When the time came to depose this royal governor, two 
of the committee chosen to undertake this delicate and disgree- 
able office were from our county, w^hile a third, John Mehelm, 
afterwards became a resident, and filled for many years to the 
great satisfaction of the people the position of surrogate. i\t this 
time he was living in Hunterdon county, at a place since known 
as Hall's mills, where he owned one hundred acres of land and a 
flouring mill. He was a stanch Jerseyman whose patriotism 
stood many severe tests ; from the first murmuring of the colon- 
ists against the home government he was an advocate for inde- 
pendence, and throughout the war was an associate of, and a coun- 
seUor with, the ablest and purest men of the country. He served 
as a member of the provincial congress, the convention, and the 
committee of correspondence and safety. 

William Paterson, who was New Jersey's second governor, 
has always been considered one of the great men of that time. 
He, too, displayed the most intelligent devotion to many public 
trusts in state and country; represented New Jersey in the 
senate of the nation, and died in 1806 as judge of the supreme 
court of the United States. His residence was an antiquated 
stone mansion, no longer in existence, on a plantation known 
as the '^ Paterson Farm," lying two miles south of Somerville on 
the Raritan river. Here, as the guest of Judge Paterson, 
Aaron Burr spent much of his time while an undergraduate at 
Princeton, and here he prepared for admission to the bar. 
Of Witherspoon we have already learned much, and as to the 

* His salary was fixed at £550, equal to 1466| Spanish dollars. Marriage 
licenses, letters of administration and other perquisites increased the annual stip- 
end about £350. The salary of the chief-justice was £350 and of the other two 
judges £300 ; treasurer £150, attorney-general £30. Delegates to congress $4 a 
day while present, and members of assembly $2 a day. During Franklin's 
administration the salary of the colonial governor had been gradually raised to 
£3,200, with perquisites amounting to about $1,000. 



302 The Story of an Old Farm. 

third member of this historic committee, William Livingston, all 
who know the a, b, c, of Revolutionary history are familiar with 
the valuable record of this distinguished war-governor. His 
sound judgment in counsel, and his coolness and courage in 
action and execution, brought inestimable benefits upon the 
coimtry, and his services in the cause of freedom take rank with 
those of Washington, Hancock and Adams. His residence was 
in Elizabethtown — an ample brick mansion known as ^' Liberty 
Hall," which is still standing, owned and occupied by John 
Kean, the great-grandnephew of the governor. It has had a top 
storey added ; otherwise with the exception of moderaized 
windows and fireplaces it is much the same as it was during the 
Revolution. A large tree which faces the front door was planted 
in 1772 by Livingston's oldest daughter Susan, who afterwards 
married John Cleves Symmes. 

We have now sketched in a hurried manner the successive 
steps taken by the people of New Jersey in their progress from 
a condition of being the mere dependent subjects of a foreign 
government to that of free citizens of a fi'ee republic, able 
almost at once to assume the rights of membership in the family 
of nations. Well-informed readers may deplore the time lost in 
telling over again the well-known story of the outbreak of the 
Revolution ; but without a proper stage-setting our Somerset 
actors in the approaching drama could not well play their parts. 

As a background to the scene in which they are to figure, it is 
also necessary to consider the condition of the coimtry in the 
spring of 1776. At that time it was truly but the beginning of 
things for the United States of America. Where is now the 
centre of population buff"aloes browsed in herds, and wild deer 
had naught to fear froin the crack of the woodsman's rifle. Even 
the valleys through which flow the Mohawk and the Genesee were 
almost destitute of white population, and those regions were still 
the hunting and fighting grounds of the painted warriors of the 
dreaded Six Nations of the North. Great cities, the pulsations 
of whose markets are to-day noted in the moneyed centres of all 
Europe, were not yet conceived, and their sites were solitudes of 
wildernesses. 

Eastern and Middle Pennsylvania lay quiet in the shade of a 
vast and sombre forest ; Pittsburgh, a mere collection of log 



The United States of 1776. 



303 



cabins, was just becoming known as a point where emigrants 
built their keel-boats, and launched themselves and their fortunes 
on the waters of the Ohio. New York city in population was 
but little larger than is Plainfield of to-day, and smaller, by 
many thousands, than is Elizabeth ; those two populous places 
were then, respectively, but a hamlet and a small village ; while 
Somerville was not to have an existence for yet a quarter of a 
century. Newark in 1777 contained but one hundred and forty- 
one houses, and at no time during the war did it exceed one 
thousand in population. New Brunswick claimed about the 
same number. A round cupola capping a square wooden 
church-tower rising above a few clustering houses, was all that 
marked where now centres over half a million of people as the 
city of Brooklyn. Powles' Hook was represented by a ferry- 
tavern and a few scattering dwellings ; it was not till 1820 that it 
was rebaptized as Jersey City, and even then had but three 
hundred residents. Only about one-quarter of the lands of East 
Jersey had been located, and the inhabitants of the entire state 
numbered less than one hundred and fifty thousand. In the 
entire country there were but twenty-eight postoffices ; as late as 
1791 New Jersey possessed but six, and at that time Somerset 
county appears to have had none. 




CHAPTER XXII. 

The Turbulent Sea of the JRevolution — The Soldiers of Somerset 
— William Alexander, Lord Stirling; Captain Andrew 
Malick, and Private John Maliclc. 

And now we find the men of Somerset prepared to do their 
part toward manning the new ship of state, which is at last fairly 
launched on the turbulent sea of the Revolution. But notwith- 
standing the ominous notes of war, the daily routine of Bedmin- 
ster life continued. Sun-browned men went to and from the 
fields, peddlers wandered from village to farm, and women gos- 
sipped as they spun or stepped in their short kirtles to the music 
of their swiftly whirling yarn-wheels. 

There was little or no break in the industries that centred 
about the '^ Old Stone House." The bills, bonds and corre- 
spondence preserved from that time show that work continued at 
the tanner}'^ and on the farm, their products finding a ready 
market. By this time the land had been considerably curtailed 
of its original area. At the death of Johannes a division of his 
estate was made by will among his children. All the provisions 
of this last testament are not known, no copy having been found, 
but references in subsequent deeds show that the tannery, home- 
stead, and two hundred acres fell to Aaron. The southern por- 
tion of the farm, embracing one hundred and sixty-seven acres, 
being all the land fronting on the Bernardsville and Lamington 
road, was devised to Aaron's youngest brother, Peter. Upon 
this land, sometime before the Revolution, he erected a house 
and farm-buildings. They were located on the site of the 
present residence of Alfred Johnson in the village of Bedminster. 
Here on the breaking out of the war Peter was living with his 
wife and three children, David, John, and Catharine. 



St. James' Lutheran Church. 305 

Andrew's share of his father's estate was probably what 
remained of the four hundred and nine acres of land in Greenwich 
township, Sussex, now Warren county, which Johannes had pur- 
chased of John F. Garrits in 1747. It will be remembered that 
in 1758 one hundred and eighty-one acres of this purchase 
were conveyed to Gottfried Moelich. At any rate, this is 
where Andrew settled on leaving the homestead, and he con- 
tinued to be a resident of that township until his death in 1820. 
On the fourth of July, 1776, he received a commission as 
captain in the 1st Kegiment, Sussex militia, commanded by 
Colonel, afterwards General, William Maxwell, and throughout 
the war was active in the service of his country. 

In the year 1769 Andrew was prominently connected with form- 
ing the congregation of St. James Lutheran church. Its first edifice 
was erected at the close of that year about three miles from Phil- 
lipsburg, on the road leading to Springtown. It was built of logs, 
with a breadth of thirty by a length of forty feet, having a straw 
thatched roof, from which comes its present name, " Straw 
Church." This primitive structure made way in 1790 for a 
larger stone edifice, which was followed in 1824 by the brick 
building now in use. The old records of this congregation, which 
begin with the year 1770, name as pastors. Christian Streit 
and Peter Muhlenberg. The latter was at that time the resi- 
dent clergyman of Zion Lutheran church at New Germantown, 
Hunterdon county, and for the congregation of this '' Straw 
Church," probably acted as supervising rector. This was the 
same Peter Muhlenberg who afterwards became famous as the 
Revolutionary general. Christian Streit was also the pastor of a 
Lutheran church at Easton. The records of St. James' show 
Andrew to have been continuously a communicant, and for many 
years an elder and warden. Upon the pages of its old church book 
are also recorded the baptism of four of his children, the first 
having been Catarina, who was born on the fourth of April, 1770, 
and baptised on the third of June. In the graveyard of this 
church, surrounded by his wife, children, and many of his 
descendants, Andrew lies buried. His crumbling tombstone bears 
the following inscription : 



20 



306 The Story of an Old Fa km. 

In Memory of 

CAPTAIN ANDREW MELICK.* 

Who was born December 24, 1729, and departed this life June 29, 1820, 

Aged 90 years, 6 months and 5 days. 

Beneath this earth the remains 
Of an old and respected fellow 
Citizen reposes. Stranger pause and 
Contemplate the frailties to 
Which human \iature is exposed. 
And ere you leave this spot learn 
To know and feel that man is dust 
And to dust must return. 

His wife Catharine, who died on the twenty-ninth of October, 
1804, in the sixty-fourth year of her age, has the following 
verse upon her gravestone : 

Rest gentle corpse beneath this clay, 
Now time has swept your cares away, 
For surely now all troubles cease 
While in the grave you rest in peace. 

At the breaking out of the Revolution Aaron was beyond the 
age required by the acts of provincial congress for serving in 
the militia. As has already been shown he was a member of 
the Bedminster committee of observation and inspection, and 
furnished the sinews of war. He did moi'e than this ; he 
buckled the armor on his oldest son John, then a lad of but 
eighteen, and sent him off with his blessing to fight the battles 
of his country. It is to be regretted that our knowledge of 
John's Revolutionary services is not more complete in its details. 
In General William S. Stryker's " Roster of the Men of New 
Jersey in the Revolution," published by authority of the state, 
he appears as a private in Captain Jacob Ten Eyck's company of 
the 1st Battalion, Somerset militia, and also as a private in one 
of the New Jersey regiments of the continental line. 

At the outset of the war this 1st Battalion was commanded 
by William Alexander — known to history as Lord Stirling ; a 
son of Somerset in whose Revolutionary record the people of the 
county justly take mtich pride. While in England in 1756 he 
laid claim to the earldom of Stirling, which had been in abey- 

* Although Andrew's name appears on his tombstone " Melick," throughout 
life he generally spelled it " Malick," and it was so written on the muster-rolls 
of the 1st Sussex Battalion. 



LoHD Stirling's Record. 307 

ance for a number of years. Although successful in establishing 
a direct descent, the house of peers, before whom his claim went 
for final adjudication, decided against him. The title, however, 
seems to have been allowed, in this country at least, by courtesy. 
Washington, in his correspondence, invariably addressed him as 
'* My Lord," and always spoke of him as " his lordship." On his 
return to America in 1761, he settled at Basking Ridge on the 
estate, as has been shown in a previous chapter, that had been 
acquired by his father, James Alexander. Here he made 
improvements which for taste and expense were much greater 
than anything of the kind ever attempted in the province. His 
grounds were laid out in the manner of an English park, and the 
spacious mansion possessed all the characteristics of a gentle- 
man's seat in the old country. This large dwelling, together 
with its connecting offices, stables, and coach-houses, were orna- 
mented with cupolas and gilded vanes, and surrounded a paved 
court or quadrangle. There was a grand hall and an imposing 
drawing room, with richly decorated walls and stuccoed ceilings. 
Jones, the tory historian, who, of course, bore Lord Stirling 
no love, states that while living here ^' he cut a splendid figure, 
he having brought with him from England, horses, carriages, a 
coachman, valet, butler, cook, steward, hair-dresser and a mis- 
tress." Here this American nobleman lived the life of a country 
gentleman of fortune; he rode in a great coach with gilded panels 
emblazoned with coronets and medallions, and altogether affected 
a style and splendor probably unequalled in the colonies. He 
was a member of the king's council, a colonel in the militia, and 
was naturally the most conspicuous figure in the county. 

At the first sign of a severance of the relations between the 
colonies and the home government, Lord Stirling warmly 
espoused the popular cause, and throughout the war, as is well 
known, proved himself a stanch patriot, and a soldier brave to 
rashness. On the thirteenth of October, 1775, the provincial 
congress of New Jersey, acquiescing in a recommendation of 
continental congress, organized two battalions, consisting of 
eight companies of sixty-eight privates each. This was the first 
call on New Jersey, and, together with a third battalion organized 
in February, 1776, it was known as the '^ First Establishment" 
of troops from the colony for the continental army. The men 



308 The Story of an Old Farm. 

were enlisted for one year, and Lord Stirling was commissioned 
as colonel of the 1st Battalion. All readers of history are fam- 
iliar with his subsequent career. He was soon promoted to be a 
brigadier-general and fought stubbornly at the battle of Long 
Island, where he finally was captured by the enemy. Having 
been exchanged for the governor of Florida, at the battle of Tren- 
ton his brigade opened the fight. For his distinguished services 
he was elevated to the rank of major-general, and as such, in 
1777, we find him fighting with Washington at the bloody battle 
of Brandywine. The next year, he it was who, at the most crit- 
ical time on the field of Monmouth, so effectively handled his 
artillery as to dismay and check the British, while at the same 
time exciting their surprise and admiration. So, throughout the 
war, he was ever conspicuous among the leading and most noted 
of the Revolutionary generals. His appearance was imposing, 
and it has been said that, next to Washington, he possessed the 
most martial presence of any commander in the army. Lord 
Stirling never returned to his home amid the New Jersey hills. 
He died in 1784: at Albany, New York, while in command of the 
" Northern Department." 

When Colonel Alexander was transferred from the militia to 
the continental line, Lieutenant-Colonel Stephen Hunt was 
promoted to the command of the 1st Somerset Battalion. The 
acquaintance of Hunt we have already made as the owner of the 
mills adjoining the " Old Farm " on the opposite side of Peapack 
brook. He will also be remembered as a member of the com- 
mittee of observation and inspection with Aaron Malick. That 
John Malick should have enrolled himself in this regiment can- 
not be charged to any special spasm of patriotic virtue. He had 
no choice. As early as the third of June, 1777, the provincial 
congress declared that the time had come for the people of the 
province to arm for defence. On that date, and in August and 
October of the same year, acts were passed making it obligatory 
on all citizens, between the ages of sixteen and fifty, to enroll 
themselves into militia companies that the several committees of 
safety were directed to form. These companies were then 
embodied into regiments which were distributed throughout the 
state, Somerset's quota being two. Each man was obliged to 
furnish himself with a ''good musket or firelock, and bayonet, 



New Jersey Minute-Men. 309 

sword or tomahawk, a steel ramrod, worm, priming-wire and 
brush fitted, thereto, a cartridge-box to contain twenty-three 
rounds of cartridge, twelve flints, and a knapsack." Militiamen 
were also required to keep in readiness at home one pound of 
powder and three pounds of bullets. The only men of proper 
age who could avoid militia service were those employed by the 
province, or who were occupied in the manufacture of government 
supplies. Of course, there were instances of individuals of cow- 
ardly nature or weak patriotism who were glad to take advantage 
of this exemption and seek such employment. In March, 1778, 
the Hibernia furnace in Morris county was engaged in produc- 
ing shot and shell, and consequentl}' offered itself to such persons 
as a city of refuge. The superintendent of the works, in speak- 
of the exemption of his employes, thus wrote to his principal, 
Lord Stirling : — 

My Lord, this is the only thing that induces the greater part of the men to 
work here, as they are farmers and have left their farms and come liere solely to 
be clear of the militia and from no other motive. I find they are d.etermined to 
shutile the time away they are exempt and do as little business as they possibly 
can. Could not your Lordship send us some of the Regular and Hessian desert- 
ers? I will do my endeavour to make thirty or forty of them serviceable. 

The militia law of August, 1775, in compliance with the rec- 
ommendation of continental congress, authorized the raising 
of minute-men ; Somerset furnished four companies formed 
in one battalion. They were uniformed in hunting shirts, took 
precedence over other militia, and were required to be in con- 
stant readiness to march to any point for the defence of Ncav 
Jersey or a neighboring colony. So many of the uiinute-meu 
joined the continental army — as it was their privilege to do — that 
the battalions became much reduced, and before the first of 
March, 1776, they were disbanded and incorporated in the 
militia. The first service tliat the Somerset troops were called 
upon to perform was in answer to an application of the New 
York committee of safety for a force to aid in suppressing tories 
on Long Island. Seven hundred militiamen were consequently 
ordered to march under field officers Colonel Nathaniel Heard, 
Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Thomas, and Major John Dunn. 
Of this command one hundred were minute-men from Somerset, 
and there are reasons to believe that John Malick was among the 
number. The battalion marched from Woodbridge on the sev- 



310 The Story of an Old Farm. 

enteenth of January. On reaching Manhattan Island they were 
reinforced by three hundred men, among whom was a New York 
city volunteer organization, which, it is said, was composed of 
the most abandoned of the population. This reinforcement was 
under the command of Major De Hart of New Jersey, and on the 
twenty-ninth instant the combined forces crossed to Long Island 
and proceeded at once on the object of the mission, which was 
the apprehension of violent loyalists, and the disarming of the 
disaffected of the inhabitants. The political aspect of affairs on 
the western end of Long Island was very different from that of 
its neighbors, patriotic New England, New Jersey, and the rest 
of New York. Loyalty and rebellion blended, the balance of 
power, before the arrival of troops, being largely in favor of the 
former. The rich aristocrats, and the phlegmatic Dutch who 
were also well-to-do, were averse to distui-bing the peace and 
order of the communities. This was especially so in Queen's 
county, which was largely tory, and the county of King's was 
almost equally reluctant to show its influence on the side of the 
Revolutionary movement. 

The march of this invading force through these two counties 
spread dismay among the inhabitants. Colonel Heard was well 
fitted for his ungrateful mission, and was indefatigable in pursuit 
of the objects of the movement. So far as lay in his power he 
treated friend and foe with civility and kindness. He found it 
difficiUt, however, to control his auxiliary force, especially 
the company from New York city ; their excesses caused him 
much pain ; and acrimony and bitterness were engendered among 
the residents of the island against the military representatives of 
the colonists. To quote from the " Collections of the Long Island 
Historical Society ": — 

So flagrant and scandalous were many of the outrages perpetrated by De Hart's 
force that the officers of the minute-iuen, who had doubtless been chosen agreea- 
bly to the orders of Congress as j)rndent and discreet men, were shocked at their 
license and longed to be rid of tlieir disorderly companions. The minute-men of 
New Jersey were respectable farmers and tradesmen, heads of families in many 
instances ; and tliese humane men scorned the petty plunder which the others 
appropriated, as nmch as they commiserated the distress of which they were com- 
pelled to be the authors. 

The above quotation is a fair example of the many Avarra 
tributes found in Revolutionary literature to the yeomanry 



A Tribute To Jersey Militiamen. 311 

of our state. In them was a military force, unique in the history 
of warfare. Far be it from me to decry the inestimable services 
of the men of the continental line — their bones lie under the 
sods of too many well-fought battle-fields. But the New Jersey 
militiamen stand as distinct figures on the Revolutionary canvas, 
and their praises cannot be too often or too loudly sung. They 
well deserved the liberty for which they fought, and the 
remembrance of the self-sacrifice with which they exerted them- 
selves in behalf of freedom and independence is a heritage dearly 
prized by their descendants, who now enjoy all the blessings 
that flow from their valuable services. It must be acknowledged 
that for a short sixty days, or maybe forty, at the close of the 
year 1776, they faltered in their faith, and, discoui'aged by the 
fearful adversities of the hour, many were inclined to abandon 
the cause, and seek protection for their homes and families from 
a victorious enemy. But it was a temporary disaffection. They 
soon learned to detest the promises of the invader, and, angered 
by the outrageous injuries visited on them by the British, 
they resumed their arms. Henceforth the militia of the 
Jerseys stood pre-eminent among the defenders of the liberties 
of the people. As was written at the time by one who, though 
not a resident of the state, was a witness of and a participant in 
their glorious achievements : — 

They hovered around the enemy and liarrassed him beyond his stationary 
guards; the aged watched, ex{)k)red, designed — tlie youth, alert, courageous, and 
ever ready for the outset, planted a hedge of pickets in General Washington's 
front to abate his painful solicitudes, to conceal his nakedness, and support the 
Revolution during a period in which a second army was totally disbanded and a 
third levied under the eyes of a British commander. 

On this head we also have the testimony of Washington. In 
a letter written to the Pennsylvania legislature in October, 1777, 
he says : — 

The exertions of the New Jersey militia have kept the enemy out of her 
limits, except now and then a hasty descent, without a continental regiment. 
Besides doing this, she has sent, and is now sending reinforcements to this and 
the northern army. 

John Hancock, too, writing in September of the same year to 
Governor Livingston, testifies : — 

The militia by their late conduct against our cruel enemies have distinguished 
themselves in a manner that does them the greatest honor, and I am persuaded 



312 The Story of an Old Farm. 

they will continue to merit, on all occasions when called upon, the reputation 
they liave so justly acquired. 

In August, 1776, the militia was divided into two divisions — 
that is, every organization was divided into two parts. One was 
ordered to report immediately to General Washington for one 
month's tour of duty, as it was termed ; the other was required 
to be in readiness to relieve the first. In this manner, until the 
close of the war, the two divisions did alternate and valiant ser- 
vice, acting with the continental army at the battles of Long 
Island, Assunpink, Princeton, G ermanto\^Ti, Springfield and 
Monmouth. They also, when not on a tour of duty, were fre- 
quently called upon to defend their homes and communities, and 
performed a distinguished part in the fights and skirmishes 
known as Quinton's Bridge, Hancock's Bridge, Three Rivers, 
Connecticut Farms and Van Nest's Mills (Weston). 

Although early in 1776 campaigns were being prosecuted in 
the North and South, the main theatre of war continued to be in 
the East. But in April it was transferred to New York. Too 
soon the scene will again be shifted — the next time to the west 
side of the Hudson Kiver, for New Jersey was yet that year to 
know the martial sound of trumpets, to grow familiar with the 
tread of armies, and to feel the dread stroke of war. On the 
seventeenth of March the British acknowledged the superior 
generalship of Washington by evacuating Boston, embarking in 
their fleet and sailing away for Halifax. As the commander-in- 
chief felt confident that the ultimate design of the enemy was to 
attack New York, he decided to make that city his base of 
operations, and consequently marched with his army to Manhat- 
tan Island. On the ninth of July the fleet from Halifax passed 
inside of the Hook. A few^ days later Sir Henry Clinton with 
three thousand men arrived on Sir Peter Parker's battered 
squadron that had just returned froin the misfortunes of Charles- 
ton. Almost daily thereafter ships crossed the bar laden with 
troops, tmtil on the twelfth of August eighty-two transports and. 
six men-of-war arrived, bearing a final contingent of nearly eight 
thousand Hessians and one thousand English guards. At this 
time New York bay and its vicinity presented a maritime scene 
unequalled before or since. Almost its entire surface was cov- 
ered by ships, attended by innumerable galleys, bateaux and 



Battle of Long Island. 313 

small boats. Thirty-seven men-of-war guarded four hundred 
transports, which had brought to America thirty-five thousand 
soldiers and sailors, together with artisans, servants, trains of 
artillery, and all the necessary horses, provisions, and munitions 
of war for that great body of men. 

During the summer the country was in a painful tension. The 
sense of the great struggle so surely impending was uppermost 
in every one's mind. On the third of June the continental 
congress called upon the colonies for thirteen thousand eight* 
hundred militia to re-inforce the army at New York. New Jer- 
sey was required to furnish thirty-three hundred men, and 
eleven days thereafter the provincial congress ordered that the 
force be raised to serve until the first of December, and to be 
formed of five battalions, composed of eight companies of seventy- 
eight men each. One of these battalions contained three com- 
panies from Somerset and five from Hunterdon, its field officers 
being Colonel Stephen Hunt, Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Johns- 
ton and Major Joseph Phillips ; Hunt became disabled, and 
resigned on the thirteenth of July, when the lieutenant-colonel 
was promoted. Colonel Johnston was subsequently killed at the 
battle of Long Island, and was succeeded by Major PhiUips, Cap- 
tain Piatt Bayles being promoted to major. When this command 
marched away, John Malick carried a musket in its ranks. The 
five battalions were brigaded under Colonel Nathaniel Heard, 
who was promoted to be a brigadier-general. His brigade 
formed a part of Washington's army, which on the eighth of 
August was composed of seventeen thousand two hundred and 
twenty-five men, mostly raw troops, of whom thirty-six hundred 
and fifty-eight were sick and unfit for duty. Of this force eight 
thousand lay on Long Island between Bedford and the East 
river, the rest on Manhattan Island, the line extending as far 
as King's Bridge, the extreme points being seventeen miles 
apart. The command with which John Malick was connected 
was on Long Island. 

On the twenty-seventh of August this little army of poorly 
armed, undisciplined militia, that was stretched thinly along an 
extended line south of Brooklyn, received the shock of a vast, 
thoroughly-equipped body of Bi'itish and Hessian soldiers, sup- 
ported by a great fleet. Defeat was almost a foregone conclusion ; 



314 The Story of an Old Farm. 

in the light of subsequent knowledge it seems extraordinary that 
the American army was not entirely annihilated. The total 
loss of the enemy was three hundred and sixty-seven men, of 
whom but twenty were killed, five being officers. The esti- 
mated loss of the Americans in killed, wounded and prisoners 
was two thousand, among the latter being Generals Sullivan and 
Lord Stirling, and one who served his country with equal ardor on 
that day, though in the more humble position of the bearer of a 
flint-lock — John Malick. 

Included among the dead was Colonel Philip Johnston, the 
commandant of the provisional battalion to which the Somerset 
companies were attached. At a critical period of the battle his 
command occupied the right and centre of Sullivan's advance 
line at the redoubt at Flatbush pass. Here our Jersey soldiers 
made a heroic stand against Colonel von Donop's force of German 
yagers, riflemen and grenadiers. In the heat of the action a 
musket ball tore its way into the heart and ended the life of Col- 
onel Johnston. So perished, just thirty-five years to a day from 
the date of his birth, a gallant officer, and one of the first to fall 
in the service of the new state. He was the son of Philip John- 
ston, who lived in a large stone mansion at Sydney in Hunterdon 
county, in which house the younger Philip was born in 1741. 
The colonel had acquired a military reputation before the Revo- 
lution, having gained credit as a brave soldier while serving with 
the New Jersey battalion in the French war. His behavior at 
the engagement on Long Island was most marked. General 
Sullivan, who witnessed his spirited conduct and death, said of 
him : " No officer could have behaved with greater firmness and 
bravery ;" and General Jeremiah Johnson characterized him as 
being as gallant an officer as ever commanded a battalion, and 
declared his conduct on Long Island to have been remarkable 
for intrepidity and heroism. Colonel Johnston was a fighter by 
heredity, as his family was descended from an ancient barony in 
Anandale, Scotland, which in early days was a warlike clan and 
a great terror to border thieves. Like many brave soldiers the 
colonel was a warm friend, and a tender, loving husband and 
father. It is recorded that in 1776 when he was leaving home 
for the front he went into the room where his three little chil- 
dren were in bed, and, kissing them farewell, knelt down and 



Battle of Long Island. 315 

commended his family to God in prayer. One of those children, 
Mary, became the wife of Joseph Scudder, and was the mother 
of Doctor John Scudder, the world-renowned missionary to India. 
It is not within the province of this work to narrate the details 
of the battle of Long Island. When the relative condition 
of the two armies is considered, that it should have resulted 
in so dire a disaster is readily to be seen was inevitable. 
George Collier, commander of "His Majesty's Ship Rainbow, 
forty-four guns," in a letter to England, thus wrote of the calibre 
of the opposing forces. While not endorsing the sentiment or 
the conclusion of the extract, we may value the information as 
the evidence of an eye-witness, and esteem it the greater because 
written after the engagement by an enemy who, naturally, would 
not desire to rob the victors of any of their laurels by unduly 
belittling the strength and effectiveness of their opponents : — 

Mr. Washington of Virginia, who had formerly served in the last war against 
the French, had the chief command of the rebel army and took upon himself the 
title of General. The utmost of his collective force did not amount to sixteen 
thousand men, all of whom were undisciplined, unused to war, wanting in clothing 
and even necessaries, and very ill provided with artillery and ammunition. His 
officers were tradesmen of different professions, totally unacquainted with disci- 
pline, and consequently utterly unskilled in the art of war. 

The writer then goes on to speak of the English army : — 

General Howe had now the satisfaction of finding himself at the head of full 
twenty-four thousand fine troops, most completely furnished and appointed, com- 
manded by the ablest and best officers in the world, and having a more numerous 
artillery than liad ever before been sent from England. Such was the exact 
state of both arms before any operation was undertaken. Justice on the royal 
side and treason on the other made the balance still more unequal. 

Another foreign officer who participated in the battle — Col- 
onel Von Heeringen of a Hessian regiment — also thus wrote as 
to the American soldiers : — 

No regiment is properly dressed or armed, every one has a common musket 
like those which citizens use in Hessia wlien they march out of town on Whit- 
suntide, with the exception of one of Stirling's regiments that was dressed in 
blue and red and consisted of three battalions, for the most part Germans enlisted 
in Pennsylvania. They were tall fine fellows, and carried beautiful English 
muskets with bayonets. 

John Malick's campaigning for the time-being was at an end. 
A few days later he was taken over to New York and delivered 
with many other prisoners to the tender mercies of Provost- 



316 The Story of ax Old Farm. 

Marshal Cunningham, of infamous memory.* He was thrown into 
one of the New York sugar-houses, and his sufferings in that 
pest-prison can better be imagined than described. Lieutenant 
Robert Troup of the Long Island militia, in an affidavit made 
before Governeur Morris, gives a distressing account of the treat- 
ment of himself and other prisoners taken at the battle of Long 
Island, and placed in charge of the provost. They were allowed 
no fuel, and the provisions were so scanty and of such an inferior 
quality that, as he expressed it : — 

He doth verily believe that raost of them would have died if they had not been 
supported by the kindness of some poor persons and common prostitutes wlio 
took pity on their miserable situation and alleviated it. 

There were three sugar-houses at this time in use as prisons: 
Rhinelander's, on the corner of William and Duane streets ; Van 
Courtlandt's, on the northwest corner of Trinity churchyard and 
Thames street ; and a third, the most noted, a five-storey 
stone building which stood a few feet east of the Middle Dutch 
church, at what is now numbers thirty-four and thirty-six 
Liberty street. During the fall and winter thousands of per- 
sons were incarcerated in these sugar-houses, and the unfortu- 
nates suffered great hardships because of overcrowding, filth, and 
disease. All persons of humanity were outraged by the treat- 
ment of the prisoners. Their rations were of the worst possible 
character, and when winter came man}' perished with the cold, 
they being provided with neither fire nor covering. So great 
were their sufferings that fifteen hundred died. The dead were 
dragged from their prisons, and piled up outside the doors till 
there were enough to make a load. They were then carted 
away to the Potters' Field, tumbled helter-skelter in a great 
trench, and but partially covered with earth. The miseries 
endured by the prisoners were made much greater by the 
inhumanity of their jailor, Provost-Marshal Cunningham. The 
name of this man will go down through the ages as one to be 
execrated by all lovers of humanity. Not content with the 
physical sufferings he was enabled to heap upon those in his 
charge, he did not hesitate to add the most terrible mental aftiic- 
tions. It was his delight to torture the minds of special 
prisoners by announcing that on a certain day they were to be 
hanged. He it was who, on the twenty-second of September of 



Peovost-Marshal Cunningham. 317 

this year, executed with unnecessary brutality young Nathan 
Hale, the '^ patriot spy," whose last words were '' I only regret 
that I have but one life to lose for my country." In conducting 
this execution the provost acted in a most unfeeling manner. 
The brave captain was hanged from an apple tree in Colonel 
Rutgers' orchard, near where now Market street and East Broad- 
way intersect. He was surromided by spectators who were 
indignant at Cunningham's brutality, the women giving loud 
sobs in their sympathy for the sufferer. Notwithstanding Hale's 
appeals he was denied the services of a clergyman ; and even a 
Bible, for a moments' devotion, was refused him. The provost 
destroyed letters that the sufferer left for his mother and friends, 
under the plea that it would not do to let the rebels know there 
was a man in their army who could die with so much firmness. 
For the benefit of those who take comfort in compensations it may 
be well to state that this same Captain Cunningham was hanged 
in London in 1791 for forgery. In his dying confession he 
acknowledged that when provost in New York he had executed 
many prisoners on his own responsibility, and without trial. 
How long John Malick remained in the clutches of this monster 
is unknown. Tradition speaks of his having been taken from 
prison by a British general whom he was forced to serve until 
included in a cartel. When finally exchanged he enlisted in the 
continental line, but of his additional Revolutionary record 
nothing has been preserved. 

Our future interest in the American army lies in its experi- 
ences on New Jersey soil. We may therefore pass over Wash- 
ington's masterly retreat from Long Island under the cover of a 
dense fog; the evacuation of New York city ; the successful stand 
made by the continental army at Harlem ; the indecisive action 
at White Plains on the twenty-eighth of October ; and the fall of 
Fort Washington on the sixteenth of November, which may be 
considered the greatest disaster that befell the American arms 
during the war. Before the latter catastrophe the main British 
army had moved to the east side of the Hudson, in the vicinity 
of Dobb's Ferry. Washington, feeling uncertain as to the 
designs of the enemy, dispatched Heath to Peekskill with 
three thousand men to guard the approaches to the High- 
lands, and leaving Lee with over five thousand men at 



318 



The Story of an Old Farm. 



Northcastle, crossed the Hudson with what was left of the 
army, and encamped in the vicinity of Hackensack. Gen- 
eral Greene was already in New Jersey with a considerable 
force, garrisoning Fort Lee, immediately opposite Fort Wash- 
ington. 




CHAPTER XXIIL 

The British in Neiv Jersey — Washington's Retreat to the Dela- 
ware — General Lee in Somerset. 

Now commences New Jersey's bitter experience of the 
war. On the nineteenth of November Cornwallis's army, six 
thousand strong, crossed the Hudson in two hundred boats, 
and scaling the precipitous heights of the Palisades at old 
" Closter Landing," the scarlet-coated column with bristling 
bayonets moved rapidly on Fort ]jee. This was not the first 
appearance of the foe in the state. Soon after the arrival of the 
British in the harbor of New York a detachment was landed on 
Constable's Hook, which place was occupied for some time. 
The necessity was occasioned by the presence of General 
Mercer's " Flying Camp " on Bergen Neck, the English fearing 
that the Americans might prove annoying to the fleet, as some of 
the vessels lay close to the shore at the mouth of the Kills. 

On the approach of Cornwallis the garrison at Fort Lee 
abandoned that post and fell back to Hackensack, joining the 
main body of Washington's army which had made a stand on 
the right bank of the river. The combined forces now numbered 
less than six thousand men, but its commander was actively 
engaged in endeavoring to procure reinforcements. Urgent 
appeals were made to Governor Livingston for militia, and 
couriers were dispatched to General Lee, who had been left with 
between three and four thousand men (not counting those whose 
time was about expiring) east of the Hudson, directing him to 
make all haste in joining the main army with his command. 

From this time up to the cessation of hostilities, the soil of 
New Jersey was the board upon which many of the most 
desperate of the Revolutionary games were played, and her 



320 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

territory was much of the time the fighting ground or plunder 
of the enemy. It is claimed that her losses in proportion to 
wealth and population were greater than that of any other state 
save South Carolina. With the exception of the winter of Valley 
Forge and the Virginia campaign against Cornwallis in 1781 the 
continental troops were constantly in, or on the confines of, the 
state. In addition, her militia was constantly called upon by the 
commander-in-chief for special services, or to swell the number 
of the American army. 

But we must proceed with the disheartening tale of the retreat 
across the Jerseys. On the twenty-second of the month Wash- 
ington reached Newark, Cornwallis having forced him to with- 
draw from Hackensack. On the following day his army was 
mustered and found to contain but fifty-four hundred and ten 
men fit for duty, of whom the enlistments of only twenty-four hun- 
dred and one extended beyond the coming January. One brigade, 
that of General Bradley, reported but sixty men present, while 
General Beale's brigade was twelve hundred strong, but the time 
of the latter's men expired within a week. Washington remained 
at Newark for six days, when the van of the enemy appearing 
his column was set in motion for '^ Brunswick." The British 
troops rested for several days at Newark, and their stay was 
marked by desolation and ruin. Its citizens received their first 
lesson in the miseries of being under the heels of a conquering 
host. Tory and patriot were alike plundered, women and young 
girls were much worse than insulted, and as a witness of that 
time writes, those only escaped robbery and murder who were 
fortunate enough to procure a sentinel to guard their doors. He 
further recites that " there was one Captain Nutman who had 
always been a remarkable tory, and who met the British troops 
on Broad street with huzzas of joy. He had his house robbed of 
almost everything. His very shoes were taken off his feet, and 
they threatened to hang him." 

On leaving Newark the Americans moved in two columns, 
one marching via Elizabethtown and Woodbridge, and the 
other through Springfield, Scotch Plains and Quibbletown (New 
Market), they coming together again at New Brunswick. Wash- 
ington had hoped to make a stand on the south bank of the Rari- 
tan, having confidently expected to receive reinforcements at 



The Retreat Through Somerset. 321 

New Brunswick. He was doomed to disappoiutraent. Lee, 
who had been repeatedly ordered to hurry forward his command, 
had not yet come up, and the militia did not respond to the calls 
of the goveraor. In addition, a general spirit of insubordination 
pervaded the army, and hundreds, deserting the cause, went 
home, believing that a further struggle against the superior 
organization, arms and discipline of the British troops would be 
unavailing. Cornwallis, on the other hand, on approaching New 
Brunswick was largely reinforced by Howe, and Washington's 
weary, wayworn, shattered battalions were again obliged to take 
up their hurried flight toward the Delaware. The retreat was 
by way of Princeton and Kingston, and the inhabitants of lower 
Somerset had an unhappy first view of the continental army. 
They had good reason for despairing of the patriot cause, when 
they beheld their country's defenders, many of them bare-footed, 
and all illy protected from the wintry weather, dwindling away 
with each mile of their disheartening march, while being chased 
across the state by a well-clad, victorious force, •' tricked out in 
all the bravery of war." During the night that the column 
marched from New Brunswick the rain fell violently, and the 
roads were deep with mud caused by the passage of artillery 
and wagons. About daybreak on the following morning the 
rear-guard passed through Rocky Hill, every step of the 
exhausted men being above the ankles and often to the knees in 
mire. 

Washington, anticipating the possible necessity of abandoning 
the state to the enemy, had collected at Trenton all the boats of 
the upper Delaware. He reached that place with the main body 
of what was left of the army on the third of December, having 
left Lord Stirling with a detachment at Princeton to watch and 
endeavor to check the enemy until the baggage and stores could 
cross the river. The total strength of the American force, as 
shown by a return made on the first instant, was four brigades of 
sixteen regiments, with a total apparent number of forty-three 
hundred and thirty-four men, but of these, ten hundred and 
twenty-nine were sick and absent, while those left were rapidly- 
leaving the fleeing column. On the sixth, Stirling was reinforced 
by twelve hundred men from Trenton ; but on the seventh the 
enemy advanced in such force as to necessitate the hurried 
21 



322 The Story of an Old Farm. 

retreat of the entire American army. By midnight Washington, 
with all of his men, was west of the Delaware ; as the troops 
disembarked from the last boat the music of the pursuers could 
be heard, as their advance entered the town that had just been 
evacuated. What remained of the array — less than twenty-five 
hundred men — were now safe. The enemy, after vainly endeav- 
oring to obtain boats, showed no disposition to continue the 
chase, but went into winter quarters in the different towns, con- 
tent for that campaign with the occupation of the state, and, as 
they thought, the annihilation of an army. The rebellion was 
believed to be crushed. Howe and Cornwallis returned to New 
York, and the latter, thinking his services to be no longer 
required in America, decided to sail for England. 

For the time-being New Jersey was a captured province. 
While, as will be presently shown, many of its citizens made 
their submission to the victors, the cruelties perpetrated on the 
inhabitants by the occupying army were such as to greatly 
increase among the masses the feeling of hatred toward British 
rule. The historians of England find great difficulty in hiding 
the stains blotting the pages that recount the atrocities com- 
mitted by British soldiers on New Jersey soil ; committed, too, 
with the connivance, or at least the acquiescence, of their com- 
manding noblemen — was word ever so misused? — the Howes, 
Cornwullises, Percys and Rawdons. The sufferings of the peo- 
ple were not only caused by their being forced to impoverish 
themselves in furnishing billets and forages to the British, but by 
such marauding and plundering by the troops as would have dis- 
graced the followers of an eastern satrap. General Howe's army 
was at this time given up to indiscriminate and universal thiev^ 
ing, the officers n.ot only countenancing the outrages, but parti- 
cipating as well. The men were licentious and permitted to 
commit every manner of rapine, violence and cruelty ; conse- 
quently the tartaned Scot with his flowing skirt, the natty gren- 
adier, and the dashing dragoon with scarlet coat and bright 
yellow short-clothes, looked upon a Jersey rebel as legitimate 
prey. 

Max von Eelking, the German historian of the Revolution, 
writes that "Sir William Howe was much given to sensuous pleas- 
ures and enjoyments of every kind, frequently forgetting in their 



British Atrocities. 323 

pursuit the high duties of a general. He kept at all times a 
good kitchen and usually also a mistress, and liked to see others 
enjoy themselves in the same way." Governor Livingston, in a 
speech before the assembly in 1777, declared that the English 
soldiers, while in New Jersey, warred upon decrepit age and 
defenceless youth, plundered friends and foes, destroyed public 
records and private monuments, and, to quote his own words, 
" violated the chastity of women, disfigured private dwellings of 
taste and elegance, and in the rage of impiety and barbarism 
profaned edifices dedicated to Almighty God." 

When the British came marching through Middlesex county 
in pursuit of the retreating Americans, Dunlap the art historian, 
then a small boy, accompanied his father to Piscataway, who 
went to claim from General Grant, the commandant of a detach- 
ment, protection as a subject of the Crown. Though but a lad 
he was much impressed by the lawlessness and looting of the 
troops. In later years he thus described the scenes witnessed on 
that occasion : — 

The men of the village retired on the approach of the enemy. Some women 
and children were left. I heard their lamentations as the soldiers carried oflf 
their furniture, scattering the feathers of beds to the winds, and piled up look- 
ing glasses with frying pans in the same heap by the roadside. The soldiers 
would place a female camp-follower as a guard upon the spoil while he returned 
to add to the treasure. 

While many instances might be given of the sufferings visited 
on the Jersey people at this time, a few illustrations will suffice 
to excuse or warrant so wholesale a condemnation of the occupy- 
ing army. Of course, those citizens most active in the patriot 
cause were especially marked for the vengeance of the British 
and their partisan allies. No feud so deadly as one between 
brothers. The ferocity exhibited at this time by the tories against 
their fellow countrymen, and often against neighbors, was inhu- 
man to a degree that in these days of peace and amity it is dif- 
ficult to comprehend. General Greene, in writing to his wife 
from New Jersey on the sixteenth of December, thus speaks ol' 
the sufferings of the inhabitants : — 

The tories are the cursedest rascals amongst us — the most wicked, villainous 
and oppressive. They lead the relentless foreigners to the houses of their neigl.- 
bors, and strip the poor women and children of everything they have to eat and 
wear ; and after plundering them in tliie sort, the brutes often ravish the 



324 The Story of an Old Farm. 

mothers and daughters, and compel their fathers and sons to behold their brut- 
ality ; many have fallen sacrifices in this way. 

In the same month Greene wrote to Governor Cook of Rhode 
Island that General Howe's ravages in New Jersey exceeded all 
description — that " houses were plundered, men slaughtered, 
women, and even little girls not ten years old, ravished in the 
presence of husbands, sons and brothers." 

In the line of the writer's maternal ancestry are the Middlesex 
families of Ayres, Dunn, and Dunham. Of the last named, fifteen 
members served in the army, nine of whom were spoliated by the 
British. David, David, Jr., and Samuel, of Piscataway, had 
their houses and barns burned; and Elisha, Jonathan, Josiah and 
John, of Woodbridge, also suffered great losses. Azariah — 
of the committee of safety — was robbed of many valuables, and 
even his aged father, the Reverend Jonathan, of Piscataway, 
was plundered by the thieving soldiery. Samuel, Jacob and 
Reuben Ayres, who were in the army, had their Woodbridge 
houses pillaged: Samuel lost cattle, sheep, hay and women's 
clothing, among the last being " one black Calamanco Cloak 
lined, new," and '' one Scarlet Cloak, part worn ; " Reuben's 
house was burned, and his horses and a " good gun " appropri- 
priated. 

Fifteen members of the Dunn family were in the army, 
ranging in giade from a private to a colonel. Eleven of 
them were despoiled by the English and tories. Captain 
Hugh Dunn,* of the 1st Middlesex militia — the writer's 
great-great-grandfather — at the outbreak of the war had just 
completed a new house. It is still to be seen at the end of 
a long lane running from the turnpike, about one mile east of 
New Brunswick ; its old-fashioned well-sweep and the great tree 
in the door-yard, in which is imbedded a Revolutionary cannon- 
ball, testifying of ancient days. When the enemy overran Mid- 
dlesex county, many of the inhabitants deserted their homes. 
Not so Captain Hugh, who determined to stay on his lands and 
defend his possessions. He was forced to give up his new 
dwelling to British officers and to move with his family into the 
__^ \ 

* He married Abigail Carman, who brought him a dowry of bedding and bed 
curtains, a silver tankard, a horse and side-saddle, and her negro servant " York." 



Captain Hugh Dunn. 325 

kitchen-part of the old house, in the main body of which was 
quartered a company of Hessians. In the end he fared much 
better than did some of his neighbors who moved back into the 
country, his losses being confined to furniture, cattle, grain and 
other personal effects, among them being — as he recites in his 
statement to the authorities, preserved at Trenton — a "new coat 
for my Negro." He and his wife paid dearly in another way, 
however, for just then a baby was born to them, and when the 
little girl began to talk, a stammering tongue and an impeded 
speech, which lasted through life, told the story of the excite- 
ments and fears of that turbulent period. Sturdy Hugh Dunn 
was a stanch patriot, and did valiant service in the cause of 
freedom. His convictions were of the strongest character, and 
they are illustrated by many curious stories preserved by his 
posterity. After the famous Boston tea-party, throughout his 
long life, he never again permitted himself to taste the " cheer- 
ing cup." He even held his own brother in contempt, who at 
the outset of the war sold his farm and moved to Canada. Many 
years afterwards, when this same brother sent him from the Biitish 
Possessions a present of a barrel of fish, he would not even grant 
it storage, but set it out on the road-side, giving all passers-by 
permission to help themselves. 

All this winter of 1776 and 1777 the Dunns of that neighbor- 
hood were marked for British vengeance. The well-furnished 
two-storey house of Justus Dann was burned ; Daniel's horse was 
taken; Benjamin lost books, furniture, and, as he states, a "stout 
negro man " ; Jeremiah was forced to contribute horses, cattle 
and crops to the enemy ; Major John Dunn, a member of the 
committee of observation and inspection, was robbed of horses 
and household furniture, including two clocks valued at sixteen 
and thirty pounds ; Lieutenant-Colonel Micajah Dunn, another 
member of the committee of observation and inspection, lost his 
horse, two guns and clothing. The above items are given to 
show how certain it was that those serving the country should 
suffer at the hands of the British. During their stay of a little 
over six months in Middlesex county these ungenerous foes 
ravaged the property of six hundred and fifty persons, and 
burned more than one hundred dwellings, mills and other build- 
ings. Charles D. Deshler, an authority on Middlesex history, 



326 The Story of an Old Farm. 

estimates that at that time there were but two thousand house- 
holders in the county, which would show that about one in every 
three was pillaged. 

A son of Somerset prominent at this period for valuable ser- 
vices rendered his country was that able scholar and statesman, 
Richard Stockton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. He was a man of wealth, and lived on a handsome 
estate near Princeton, which had descended to him from his 
forefathers. His homestead was repeatedly plundered by the 
enemy, and on the thirtieth of November, 1776, while visiting a 
Mr. Cowenhoven, he and his host were dragged from their beds 
by a party of refugee royalists. They were carried to New 
York, and Mr. Stockton was treated with such barbarity as to 
bring on an illness which in 1781 resulted in his death. A 
neighbor of Richard Stockton, and also a signer of the Declara- 
tion of Independence, was John Hart — " honest John Hart." 
He was a substantial farmer living in the vicinity of the village 
of Columbia, in Hunterdon, now Mercer coimty. Though an 
illiterate man, and quite wanting in the cultivation and accom- 
plishments which, with few exceptions, distinguished the mem- 
bers of the second congress, he possessed sound sense, strong 
will-power, and great tenacity of purpose, qualities which 
enabled him to be of signal service both as an actor and promp- 
ter in the drama of the Revolution. Hart's devotion to the 
interests of the revolted colonies brought upon him the malig- 
nant hatred of the tories, and the persecutions of the enemy. 
His sufferings during the first year of the war were most severe ; 
his property was destroyed, his family dispersed, and he himself, 
driven from the deathbed of his wife, was hunted through the 
woods, and from cottage to cave. So dire a treatment laid the 
foundation of disease which cut short his career in 1780. 

Although Bedminster township lay far north of where the 
British cantonments were located, it did not escape the miseries 
inflicted on the communities by the enemy. In December, 1776, 
a squadron of British cavalry suddenly appeared in Pluckamin, 
and visited all manner of indignities upon the place and people. 
Women were grossly insidted, dwellings robbed, and stock 
driven off. The doors of the Lutheran church were battered 
down, the pews broken up, and the pulpit hacked and disfigiired 



Cavalry Raids in Bedminster. 327 

with sabre strokes. The object of this raid was to secure the 
person of Captain Isaac Van Arsdale, who had made himself 
obnoxious because of his activity in behalf of the colonists. On 
learning of their approach he escaped to the woods, and, in con- 
junction with some neighbors, succeeded to some extent in 
harassing the marauders. At least one man was known to have 
suffered from their musket balls, as he was brought to Eoff's 
tavern, where sheets were torn up to make bandages to staunch 
his wounds. Major McDonald, who owned the mills on Cham- 
ber's brook, was probably in sympathy with these cavalrymen, 
as they treated him with consideration ; he, in return, rolled out 
a barrel of " apple jack," and regaled them with bread and 
cold ham. 

On another occasion a troop of light-horse created great havoc 
in Bedminster. They seized Elias Van der Veer, the father of 
the late Doctor Henry Van der Veer, and carried him off to 
Trenton. The detachment had been especially ordered to make 
him a prisoner, as he had become well-known to the enemy as 
an active patriot, and a spirited co-worker in the American 
cause with his brothers-in-law, Colonel John Schenck, and 
Captains Henry Schenck and Frederick Frelinghuysen. He 
was taken from his mill and placed on a horse between two 
troopers, and, although the weather was severe, was not 
given an opportunity of putting on a hat or coat. In passing 
through Pluckamin a hat was placed on his head by a neighbor, 
who on seeing him passing ran out for that purpose. The 
exposure, and the cruelties practised upon Mr. Van der Veer 
while in prison, caused his death on the twenty-ninth of Novem- 
ber, 1778, in the thirty-third year of his age, as his gravestone 
in Bedminster churchyard bears witness. 

It is not strange that innumerable experiences of a like char- 
acter, together with the fact of Washington having been driven 
from the state, should have produced a profound feeling of 
despondency. The stoutest hearts began to despair of the future, 
and many commenced to think only of the safety of their families 
and property. The victorious enemy, recognizing this growing 
sentiment, offered amnesty to soldiers and protection to citizens 
if they would return to their allegiance. Disaffection spread, 
and as many as two hundred persons came in one day to the 



328 The Story of an Old Farm. 

British headquarters and pledged their faith to the Crown ; among 
these were Samuel Galloway, a member of the first continental 
congress, and Samuel Tucker, of Trenton ; the latter had presided 
over the provincial congress of New Jersey when the state consti- 
tution was adopted, and in 1776 was justice of the supreme 
court and treasurer of the state. It is claimed that Tucker 
secured protection for the purpose of preserving public funds and 
private trusts, then in his possession. Washington, in addressing 
the national legislature on the first of January, 1777, thus 
alludes to such weak-kneed patriots : " After being stripped of 
all they had without the least compensation, protection had been 
granted for the full enjoyment of their eftects." 

The members of the family in the " Old Stone House " did 
not waver in their colonial sympathies, and Aaron showed no 
hesitation in his fealty to the best interests of the budding nation. 
So it was with all his brothers excepting the youngest, Peter. 
My fidelity as a family historian demands a true and unbiased 
account of ancestral failings, as well as of virtues ; and it must 
be acknowledged that Peter took advantage of the proclamation 
of the " Right Honorable Lord Howe, and his Excellency, 
General Howe," and received a protection paper from Lieuten- 
ant-Colonel Mawhood, of the 17th Regiment, British line, 
who commanded a brigade of foot, whereby he was assured 
protection " both for himself, his family and property, and to 
pass and repass on his lawful business without molestation." 
Peter's disaffection does not appear to have been permanent ; he 
was never classed as a loyalist, and like them did not suffer from 
attainder or confiscation, but continued to be a valued citizen. 
In making his submission he was doubtless influenced by his 
business relations with James Parker, whose acquaintance, it 
will be remembered, we made when Johannes visited the pro- 
vincial capital in 1752. Mr. Parker sometime before the Revo- 
lution purchased of the executors and heirs of John Johnstone, 
deceased, extensive bodies of land lying north of Peapack brook, 
within the Peapack patent. He appointed Peter Melick his 
agent for its care, improvement, and sale. Peter was obliged 
to make frequent journeys to Perth Amboy in order to consult 
with his principal. It is fair to presume that he imbibed more 
or less of the loyal sentiment there openly and almost universally 



Disloyalty at Perth Amboy. 329 

displayed. Being the seat of the king's government, and since 
1762 a garrieon town, a large element of its population, especially 
among the wealthier citizens, were dominated in their sympa- 
thies by the ever-present influence of royal ^ower. At the close 
of the war but a very small proportion of those who had formed 
the colonial aristocracy remained residents of the ancient capital. 
General Washington, on the fourth of July, 1776, in a commu- 
nication to congress, thus refers to Perth Amboy : — 

The disaffection of the people of that place and others not far distant, is 
exceedingly great, and unless it be checked and overawed it may become more 
general and very alarming. 

It does not appear that James Parker openly evinced hostility 
to the new order of things. He endeavored to occupy the middle 
ground of neutrality. Though in April, 1775, he was chosen a 
delegate to the provincial congress, he did not take his seat, and 
in November of that year he located his family on a farm in 
Bethlehem, Hunterdon county, his Perth Amboy home not being 
re-established until 1785. Hi's property escaped confiscation, 
though he himself does not seem to have remained at all times 
beyond suspicion ; in 1777 he was placed under arrest by the 
authorities and for a time was confined at Morristown. Mr. 
Parker's wife was a daughter of the Reverend William Skinner, 
rector of St. Peter's church. Her family was pronounced in 
favor of a continuance of British rule, and at its overthrow the 
rector's son, Courtlandt, had for seven years been attorney-gen- 
eral for the Crown. In 1776 he was commissioned a brigadier- 
general, and authorized to raise five battalions among those men 
of New Jersey who adhered to the king. He succeeded in 
obtaining at that time but five hundred and seventeen recruits, 
although later in the war the number in his command was largely 
increased. 

The strong reluctance shown by James Parker and other lead- 
ing citizens of that portion of the state, to support the Revolu- 
tion, may be ascribed somewhat to their extreme feeling of 
loyalty to the church of England. They found it difficult to 
dissever church from state. The clergy, by their oaths of con- 
formity and allegiance, felt themselves bound to sustain the 
Crown, and the communicants of the church, in a great majority 
of instances, were influenced by their spiritual guides. In 1775 



330 The Story ob^ an Old Farm. 

Doctor Tucker, dean of Gloucester, addressed a circular letter 
to the ministers of the " Established Church in Korth America" 
warning them against teaching principles as to a civil govern- 
ment drawn from Mr. Locke rather than from the gospel. This 
admonition was scarcely needed. Both before and after that 
time the rectors from their pulpits pelted their people with Paul; 
— cried out that " the powers that be are ordained of God ;" did 
not hesitate to preach that '^ they that resist shall receive to 
themselves damnation;" — and so, in their weekly discourses, 
rang all the changes on the first eight verses of the thirteenth 
chapter of the epistle to the Romans. The apostle Peter, too, 
helped them with texts as to the duty of obedience and non- 
resistance to the higher powers, enabling them to show their par- 
ishioners that those who " despised government, presumptuous 
are they." The dissenting ministers fought under the banner of 
Saint John, and declaimed witli equal vehemence against the 
idolatrous reverence paid to tyrants. They did not hesitate to 
draw comparisons between the king of England, in his rage 
against his American subjects, and that horrible wild beast with 
seven heads and ten horns, of revelation, which was ordained by 
the devil for the destruction of mankind. 

The attitude assumed by both clergy and laity of the estab- 
lished church resulted most disastrously to the sect, and 
throughout the war its adherents were ever under the ban of 
suspicion ; the people of other denominations maintained — to 
quote a writer of that period — " that a churchman and a foe to 
American liberty were synonymous terms." The effect of such 
a feeling drove the ministers from their pulpits, and brought ruin 
upon the congregations. When the British evacuated Philadel- 
phia in 1778, Doctor William White, chaplain of congress, and 
after the peace the first bishop of Pennsylvania, was the only 
JEpiscopal minister who remained in that state. When the war 
was over, in many of the northern states not a church was left ; 
and in all New Jersey Doctor Abraham Beach, rector of Christ 
church, New Brimswick, was the only minister who had beeil 
able to maintain regular services during the struggle. Through- 
out the Revolution the chaplains of American refugee regiments 
were mainly ministers of the church of England. 

Another sect that suffered severely was that of Methodism. 



Methodists and Quakers During the War. 331 

Its adherents were yet a feeble folk ; they did not number at 
the outset of the war over one thousand souls, the American com- 
munion having been established by Philip Embury in his own 
house in New York as recently as 1766. It 'is claimed that pre- 
vious to 1771 there were not over fifty Methodists in New Jer- 
sey. Bishop Asbury records that in that year there were about 
two hundred and fifty in Philadelphia, about three hundred in 
New York and a few between the Hudson and the Delaware. 
Probably the first church edifice of that denomination in New 
Jersey was the one erected just before the Revolution on the 
corner of Queen and Fourth streets in Trenton. The communi- 
cants of this sect rapidly increased in the United States, and by 
1793 numbered sixty thousand. Methodists were objects of 
suspicion during the war, and it was not uncommon for their 
preachers and class-leaders to be tarred and feathered. The 
feeling against them was due in a great measure to a pamphlet 
published by Wesley, entitled '' A Calm Address to the Ameri- 
cans." It claimed on moral and legal grounds that parliament 
had a right to tax the coloniesj and it held that American sub- 
jects opposing this right were actuated only by a desire to over- 
throw the government. In other words, the monograph covered 
about the same ground as did Doctor Johnson's pamphlet, "Tax- 
ation no Tyranny." The celebrated lexicographer was much 
gratified at Wesley's support of his views, and wrote him, saying, 
*' To have gained such a mind as yours may justly confirm me 
in my own opinion." 

Still another body of Christians that sufi'ered much in the Rev- 
olution were the Quakers, and both amusing and pathetic stories 
are told of their experiences, growing out of their adhering to 
non-combatant principles. The Quaker was ever between the 
upper and the nether millstone. His government drafted him into 
the ranks, — his "meeting" disciplined him for either bearing arms 
or procuring a substitute. The old record-books of the Society 
of Friends furnish curious information as to what was consid- 
ered a faUing away from Quaker grace. Benjamin Harris 
was cut off from communion with the " Plainfield meeting" 
for refusing to give any "satisfaction for his misconduct," in 
that he " signed a paper for independency" and " suffered his 
apprentice to go in the army." Another friend — Marmaduke 



332 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

Hunt — makes confession, when disciplined by the "meeting/^ 
that while confined in Morristown jail his distresses were so 
great that, as he says, "liberty was offered me on condition of 
my taking the affirmation of fidelity to the states, which through 
unwatchfulness I submitted to." It is on record that several 
Mendham Quakers were summoned, and made to confess their 
faiUt, and show penitence for having redeemed goods which the 
authorities had taken from them for refusing to train with the 
militia. 

On the twelfth of December there were tumult and excitement 
on the southern border of the " Old Farm." Late on that after- 
noon, through the woods that stretched away beyond the north 
branch of the Raritan toward the Bernard hills, could be heard 
the rat-ta-ta of drums and the shrill cry of fife. At first faint, 
and in the distance, but soon louder and clearer ; then there fell 
on the ear the tramp of troops, the ring of hoofs on the frozen 
ground, and the heavy roll of artillery. It was the little army 
of General Charles Lee that Washington was so impatiently 
expecting, and which had been so many days on the march from 
the Hudson. The men trudged along the narrow road in column 
of fours, and in route step, each one carrying his gun as he liked. 
They were brown and weather-beaten ; their many bivouacs on 
the Westchester and Jersey hills had left marks on their uni- 
forms and accoutrements showing the dire effects of wear, Avind 
and weather; — more properly speaking on clothing, not uniforms, 
as many of these continental soldiers were without stripe, plume 
or color, and often a sash or a corded or cockaded hat was all 
that distinguished the officer. 

The Revolutionary soldiers of " seventy six " knew little of 
neatness or of the picturesque in dress. With the exception of an 
occasional militia coat of ancient design, coarse hunting shirts and 
rough linsey-woolsey suits were the rule for the first year or so 
of the war. Their guns were of various patterns, the ordinary 
carbine, fowling-piece, and rifle no,t being uncommon, all having, 
powder-pans and flint-locks. Powder was generally carried in a 
cow's horn swung over one shoulder, while from the other hung 
a leather pouch for bullets. All the ideas prevailing at the out- 
set of the war as to soldiers and weapons were very crude. 
Even the generally astute Franklin held peculiar views and gave 



The Soldiers of 1776. 333 

curious advice, as is shown by the following extract from a letter 
written by him to General Lee on the eleventh of February, 
1776 : 

I still wish with you that Pikes could be introduced, and I would add bows 
and arrows. Those were good weapons not wisely laid aside. First — Because a 
man may shoot as truly with a bow as with a common musket. Second — He can 
discharge four arrows in the time of charging and discharging one bullet. Third — 
His object is not taken from his view by the smoke of his own side. Fourth — 
A flight of arrows seen coming upon them terrifies and disturbs the enemy's at- 
tention to his business. Fifth — An arrow striking in any part of a man puts 
him hors de combat till 'tis extracted. Sixth — Bows and arrows are more easily 
provided everywhere than muskets and ammunition. 

The clothing furnished the privates of the two battalions form- 
ing the first establishment of the Jersey line, called out by reso- 
lution of congress of October, 1775, was to each man one felt 
hat, one pair of yarn stockings and one pair of shoes. The 
monthly pay of the men was five dollars, but they were obliged 
to find their own arms ; the enlistment was for a single year. 
The second New Jersey enlistment, authorized by congress in 
September, 1776, was composed of four battalions to serve for 
the war, unless sooner discharged. In addition to their monthly 
pay the privates and non-commissioned officers received one 
hundred acres of land, and an annual kit of clothing comprising 
two linsey hunting shirts, two pairs of overalls, a waistcoat of 
wool or leather, one pair of breeches, a hat or leathern cap, two 
shirts, and two pairs of hose and shoes. Some of the militia — 
notably those of Pennsylvania — often made an attempt at a more 
dashing apparel. The term " Jersey Blues " had its origin in a 
volunteer company from the vicinity of Springfield. Its uniform 
furnished by some patriotic women of the township consisted 
of tow frocks and breeches dyed a bright blue. In the matter of 
arms there was within a year a marked improvement, as the 
agents abroad became able to make purchases in behalf of the 
young republic. When Washington's army entered Philadelphia 
in 1777, previous to the battle of Brandywine, Graydon stood 
on the Cofi'ee-house corner, and thus speaks of the appearance of 
the troops as they passed down Front street : 

They amounted to but eight or nine thousand men; though indifi'erently 
dressed they held well-burnished arms, carried them like soldiers, and looked in 
short as if they might have faced an equal number of men with a reasonable 
prospect of success. 



334 



The Story of an Old Farm. 



An important element in that little army was the Jersey line 
brigaded under GTeneral Maxwell ; it opened the battle of Brandy- 
wine, continuing in the fight tl*e entire day. The brigade also 
distinguished itself at the engagement of Germantown, the 1st 
Battalion suffering severely, both in officers and men. 




CHAPTER XXIV. 

The Capture of General Charles Lee — His Army Encamps on 
Peter MelicWs Land in Bedminster Township — The JBattle 
of Trenton. 

At the close of this twelfth day of December, 1776, when 
Lee's army crossed the north branch of the Raritan and entered 
Bedminster, his battalions, with clank of arm and swing of 
sabre, pressed on along the Lamington highway until the head 
of the column had passed a considerable distance beyond the 
crossing of the Peapack road ; the troops then deployed to the 
right and encamped, the greater part of them occupying the lands 
of Peter Melick. When the moon climbed the heavens that night 
it illumined with its mellow gleam a strange spectacle for this quiet 
Bedminster country. The roads and fields were encumbered 
with cannon and baggage-wagons, and stamping horses were 
tethered to trees and fences. Camp fires gleamed on the hill- 
sides, around which were stretched tired, bronzed-faced men, 
with ragged blankets for a covering, and with knapsacks and 
bundles for pillows. Sorry-looking soldiers they were, with 
theii' patched clothing, worn shoes cobbled with strings, and 
antiquated cross-belts and cartouch-boxes. A strange spectacle, 
indeed, upon which the moon looked down, with naught to break 
the stillness of the sleeping camp, save now and then the whin- 
neying of a picketed horse, or the occasional challenge of a 
pacing sentinal. 

Poor Peter's protection papers proved of but little avail at this 
juncture. He had not anticipated a continental visitation ; his 
fears, and for these he had prepared, were of predatory bands of 
British light-horse, or more dangerous troops of partisan rangers. 
He did not think it wise to remain at home to welcome these 



336 The Story of an Old Farm. 

military guests j his neighbors did this for him, at the same time 
informing the troops that the owner of the land upon which they 
had bivouacked was an '^ exempt." As was the fashion of the 
time, vengeance followed. Peter's fence rails fed the camp tires, 
and his recently filled smoke-house fed the troops, as did his 
chickens, shoats, and cattle. Altogether he was forced to make 
a very handsome contribution to the needs of the continental 
army. We may believe that in later years, when enjoying all the 
blessings resulting from the services of his country's devoted band 
of soldiers, he reflected without chagrin upon the sacrifices that he 
had been forced to make in those troubled times. My knowledge 
of the incidents of that night is gained from Peter's oldest daughter, 
Catharine, then a child of nearly five. She afterwards became 
the wife of Enos Mundy, and died in 1863 at the age of ninety- 
two. From her, many important facts have been gleaned as to 
early Revolutionary days, partly drawn from memory, but 
mainly from what she had learned from her parents and others 
of that time. Her statement of the events preceding and suc- 
ceeding General Lee's capture was taken down in writing and 
preserved by one of her descendants. 

As is well known, Lee did not continue this far with his 
troops, but stopped for the night, with a small guard and some 
of his aides, at a tavern kept by Mrs. White at Basking Eidge. 
It is probable that General Sullivan, who was second in com- 
mand, quartered that night at Aaron Malick's house, as it was 
among the most substantial of the neighborhood. At least family 
traditions aver — they being corroborated by Mrs. Mundy — that 
the house was full of officers, who arrived mounted. It is pleas- 
ant to learn something of the personality of the leaders of the 
Revolution who campaigned in this Bedminster country. Sulli- 
van at this time was thirty-seven years old ; possessed a well- 
proportioned and commanding figure, animated and handsome 
features, with a dark complexion illumined by the ruddy hue of 
health. His voice was deep and melodious, and in his military 
career he used it to great advantage, for it was always quick to 
respond alike to stern and gentle emotions. In the morning an 
officer came in great haste to the " Old Stone House " and 
announced the capture of the commanding general. Mrs. Mundy 
expresses it in her statement : — 



Character of General Charles Lee. 337 

There was a great fuss made in the morning, because a big oflBcer liad been 
captured or killed, or something of that sort, and Grandfather Malick had to go 
to Germantown with soldiers on horseback, and lie did not get home again until 
in the afternoon * * * quite a number of big officers staid at Grandfather's, 
and an officer came in the forenoon and told of this officer being captured or 
killed. 

It seems almost unnecessary to dwell at any length upon so 
familiar a Revolutionary incident as the capture of General 
Charles Lee, and the causes that led thereto, but perhaps this 
Bedminster story might not be considered complete should all of 
the details of the circumstance be omitted. There is no doubt 
that Lee was a brave and brilliant officer, possessing superior 
mental qualifications. He hated oppression and scorned mean- 
ness. Though when stirred by violent impulses his personal 
animosities were intense, he is said to have ever been an open 
and honest enemy. Yet at such times both in action and word he 
was too often governed by his angered passions rather than by 
reason. He was intemperate in language and always over-zeal- 
ous as to his personal rights. One readily discovers from his 
correspondence — a mass of which has been preserved — that he 
was constitutionally, what might be in vulgar parlance termed, a 
sorehead. He fully coincided with the assurances of his admir- 
ers that he was the greatest general in the country, and the rock 
upon which his career was shipwrecked was a hea'dstrong nature 
that could not brook command. The yellow-eyed serpent of 
jealousy coiled in his heart, and his unceasing vengeful feelings 
toward Washington were too great for his naturally generous 
nature to overcome. Could he have brought himself to the 
occupation of a second place in the hearts and admiration of the 
people, his name would probably have been remembered as one 
of the leading and successful generals of the war. 

Lee was at this time forty-five, and his years had been those 
of such varied experiences as rarely fall to the lot of man. By 
birth an Englishman, he first becomes known to us in 1757 as a 
captain of grenadiers in Abercrombie's fatal assault upon Ticon- 
deroga. Three years were then spent in campaigning in the 
northern wilderness, when, as a lieutenant-colonel, he went with 
Burgoyne to Portugal to aid in repelling the attacks of Spain. 
He next figures as an impetuous liberal politician in England, 
and then for two years as a staff-officer of the king of Poland at 
22 



338 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Warsaw. Then we find him with a company of Turks, almost 
perishing on the Bulgarian mountains while guarding the Grand 
Seignior's treasure from Moldavia to Constantinople. For suc- 
cessive years he was on the Bosphorus, at Warsaw, and in England, 
in which latter country he grew turbulently indignant on fail- 
ing to obtain army promotion. As a major-general in the Rus- 
sian service he next campaigned in counnand of Cossacks and 
Wallachs, when the fighting was of the severest character. And 
now we hear of him in Hungary, where he killed an Italian in a 
duel I and in the following winter in England, deep in the vor- 
tex of politics, and violent in his opposition to the government. 
The year 1772 was spent in France and Switzerland. On leav- 
ing those countries he threw himself body and soul into the 
vexed question of the American colonies, starting in 1773 for 
this country to view for himself the condition of affairs. 

After reaching America Lee became a violent supporter of the 
provincial claims against England, and his fearless spirit, his 
enthusiasm and brilliant wit, together with the romance of his 
life, soon gave him a prominence hardly equalled by any man in 
the country. He advised with members of congress, and inter- 
viewed deputies ; always feeding the flames of opposition he 
finally was recognized as a leader in the Revolutionary move- 
ment. To more closely ally himself with American interests he 
purchased a Virginia estate, whereupon, hostilities having com- 
menced, congress commissioned him as major-general in the con- 
tinental army. He was intensely chagrined at not being named 
for the chief command. While probably an ardent lover of lib- 
erty, and apparently wholly honest in advocating colonial rights, 
he had been quick to discover that the Revolutionary move- 
ment was to be one of the most important events of this or a past 
age, and he was ambitious to figure before the world as its leader. 
He felt keenly disappointed that congress should have failed to 
recognize his superior military qualifications, and the great 
sacrifices he had made for the country. When Washington was 
commissioned, Lee naturally scouted the idea that a man who 
knew nothing of a greater campaign than had been Braddock's 
could vie with him, a veteran of many wars, as commander-in- 
chief of an army. Yet, at this time at least, his love of liberty 
seems to have overshadowed his ambition. He threw up his 



Lee is Highly Esteemed. 339 

commission in the English army, and ran the risk of losing all 
of his possessions across the water, which were considerable, in 
order to accept the position offered him by congress. In the 
beginning he was indefatigable in his endeavors, and his accom- 
plishments as a soldier were so great as to seem to secure for him 
a brilliant future. 

It was Lee who first suggested to Washington and congress, in 
1776, the propriety of occupying Manhattan Island with troops. 
This resulted in his marching on the fourth of February into the 
city of New York at the head of a force he had raised in Con- 
necticut ; he was immediately reinforced by Stirling's New Jer- 
sey regiment and by Pennsylvania troops. This course was at 
first strongly opposed by the New York committee of safety, who 
feared that garrisoning the city would provoke the English ships 
to an attack which Lee's command would be too small to suc- 
cessfully meet. But the country at large held Lee in high 
esteem and gave him full support, which is shown by his corres- 
pondence with, among others, Washington, Franklin, Benja- 
min Rush, Robert Morris and John Adams. The latter wrote 
him from congress : — 

A luckier, a happier Expedition tlian yours to New York never was pro- 
jected. The whole Whig world is blessing you for it, and none of them more 
than your Friend and Servant. 

So it was when late in February he was appointed to the 
Canada command. Benjamin Rush then wrote him : — 

Fortune seems in a good humour with y©u. It is not enough that you have 
triumphed over external and internal Enemies at New York, but you are about 
to enjoy new triumphs in another part of the continent. * * * Should your 
blood mingle with the blood of Wolfe, Montcalm and Montgomery, posterity will 
execrate the plains of Abraham to the end of time. Your appointment to the 
Canada expedition gave all your friends here great pleasure. * * * Mr. 
Pitt conquered America in Germany. But who knows but General Lee may 
conquer Britain in Canada." 

Franklin also wrote him the same date, February nine- 
teenth : — 

I rejoice that you are going to Canada. God prosper all your undertakings, 
and return you with Health, Honor and Happiness. 

Congress changed its plans, and early in March, Lee, instead 
of going to Canada, was transferred to the southern department. 



340 The Story of an Old Farm. 

As is well known, at Charleston he added to his reputation, 
although more so than he really deserved, and when he returned 
north to assume command near New York he was in the full tide 
of popular favor. But the disasters of Long Island, Wliite 
Plains and Fort Washington he falsely ascribed to the incom- 
petence of Washington. Upon this belief he fed his jealousy 
until it absorbed his whole being and wrecked his career. As 
has been shown, while Washington was making his heroic 
retreat across the Jerseys, Lee not only failed to hurry to his 
support, but deliberately disobeyed the commands of his chief. 
While the army that was being pursued by Coniwallis was 
anxiously looking for the appearance of Lee's corps, that general 
delayed crossing the Hudson for several weeks, and then 
advanced in a most leisurely manner, as if fearful of being a 
help or advantage to the retreating force. His dilatoriness can- 
not be charged to his being lukewarm in the cause, or to an alto- 
gether determined disobedience on his part. He builded on the 
hope that the continued delay might furnish him with an oppor- 
tunity for striking a blow on the flank of the enemy independent 
of his chief, and thus perform a service that would redound to 
his individual honor. Like too many men before and since, who 
have occupied public trusts, his patriotism was dwarfed by per- 
sonal ambition. 

Lee's force at Newcastle had been about seven thousand men, 
but owing to the expiration of terms of enlistment, when he 
crossed the Hudson on the second of December his command was 
but twenty-seven hundred strong. His troops took up their line 
of march in a column of four files front, Nixon's brigade furnish- 
ing an advance guard of thirty men, and Glover's brigade consti- 
tuting a reserve corps, ready as circumstances required to draw 
out of the line and form one hundred yards in the rear. Flankers 
marched in single file on either side, and so the column moved 
slowly on, reaching Pompton on the seventh, and Morristown on 
the eighth, from where Lee wrote Washington that the militia 
had increased his force to four thousand men. He rested at 
IVIorristown for several days, camping on the night of the 
eleventh on a little plain southwest of the Ford mansion, now 
known as " Washington's Headquarters." Early in the following 
morning he continued across the country by way of New Vernon 



Lee at Basking Ridge. 341 

and Vealtown, and so on to where his troops encamped for the 
night, on the Melick farm, the present site of the village of Bed- 
minster, a distance of about thirteen miles. On the way, Lee, 
turning over his command to Sullivan, left his troops, and, as the 
historian Headley expresses it, " governed by some freak or 
whim, or still baser passion," took up his quarters at Mrs. Wliite's 
tavern at the village of Basking Ridge. He retained with him 
Major William Bradford of his personal staff, several other mem- 
bers of his military family, and a small guard. 

At four o'clock on the morning of the thirteenth there arrived 
at White's tavern one Major James Wilkinson, a staff officer of 
another continental general, who felt sorely because of Wash- 
ington's superior position — Horatio Gates. The sudden and 
unexpected retreat of Sir Guy Carleton from before Ticonderoga 
to Canada had enabled General Schuyler to send several regiments 
to aid Washington. This force having entered New Jersey, Wilk- 
inson, who was barely nineteen years old, had been dispatched 
by its commandant, Gates, with a letter announcing his prox- 
imity, but on learning that the commander-in-chief was already 
beyond the Delaware, the major had turned aside and taken it 
to Lee as next in rank. Lee received the letter in bed, promis- 
ing to give an answer after breakfast, whereupon Wilkinson lay 
down on his blanket before a comfortable fire until daylight. 
The general remained in bed until eight o'clock, when he came 
down stairs, half dressed and in his slippers. Major Scammel 
of Sullivan's staff, a brave officer who afterwards fell before 
Yorktown, called to obtain orders for the morning march. After 
a map had been spread on the table and examined, Lee said, 
" Tell General Sullivan to move down towards Pluckamin." 
The general then spent some time in listening to complaints from 
soldiers of his command. He was indignant at many of their 
demands, especially at those coming from members of Colonel 
Sheldon's Connecticut light-horse, whom he charged with the 
desire to go home. These militia troopers were without doubt but 
poor apologies for soldiers. They were dressed in antiquated 
state uniforms, much the worse for long service, wore old-fash- 
ioned, full-bottomed wigs, often awry, and all their accoutrements 
were of a most ancient and obsolete order. Many of their horses 
had left the plough to enter service, and, together with their 



342 The Story of an Old Farm. 

trappings, presented anything but a military appearance. One 
of these "nutmeg" horsemen being captured at the battle of 
Long Island some British officers amused themselves by forcing 
him to canter up and down in front of their quarters, while they 
made merry over his ridiculous appearance and quaint replies to 
their questions. On being asked what especial service had been 
required of his troop by the Americans, he answered, " to flank 
a little and carry tidins." 

Lee did not breakfast before ten, and then sat down to write 
to Gates. A single quotation from this letter will show its gen- 
eral tone, and the attitude assumed by its writer toward Wash- 
ington : " Entre nous a certain great man is most damnably 
deficient." Meanwhile, Major Wilkinson had his horse saddled 
and brought to the door, and then sat down at a window and 
awaited with patience the letter. At about high noon he sud- 
denly saw a troop of dragoons turn from the highway and dash 
down the. lane toward the house, which in a few seconds they 
reached and, having opened files, surrounded. " Here," cried 
the major, " are the British cavalry ! " " Where is the guard," 
exclaimed Lee, " why don't they fire ? Do, sir, see what has 
become of the guard ! " As careless as the general, the guards, 
with arms stacked, were sunning themselves on the south side of 
the house. They were soon overcome, two brave fellows who 
resisted, being killed by sabre strokes. A very short but spirited 
defence was made by Lee's suite, who, firing from the windows, 
killed several of the dragoons, including a comet. So near was 
Harcourt, their commander, to being killed that a ball carried 
away the ribbon of his queue. Among Lee's officers was a 
Frenchman, M. Jean Louis de Virnejoux, who acted with the 
greatest bravery in defending the house, but it was soon seen to 
be useless to continue the defense. The British called upon Lee 
to surrender, threatening that five minutes delay would insure 
the burning of the building. The discomfited officer almost 
immediately appeared at the open door, saying : " Here is the 
general, he has surrendered ! " He was hastily placed on 
Wilkinson's horse, his legs being firmly bound to the stirrup 
leathers ; the trumpet sounded assembly, and just as he was, 
without a hat, and in slippers and dressing-gown, they hurried 
liim off to New Brunswick. 



An Historical Error. 343 

The British also carried with them, strapped on a trooper's 
horse, M. de Gaiant, a French officer who had just arrived at 
Boston to offer his services to the country. Being on his way 
to pay his addresses to Washington, he had joined Lee's column 
as a means of safe transit. History affords but few examples of 
a general officer presenting a meaner appearance than did Lee, 
as surrounded by his exultant captors he clattered through Som- 
erset. His small and restless eyes had lost their haughty glances 
— his usually satirical mouth drooped at its corners with humili- 
ation — his large nose was red with cold — his long, lank, thin 
body shivered in the December blasts — while his soiled shirt and 
fluttering dressing-gown gave him an air quite opposed to that 
of a military chieftain. 

Historians generally agree that Lee's army halted and rested 
the night preceding his capture at Vealtown, now Bernardsville. 
From Morristown this would have been a march of but seven 
miles ; his men would fairly have had to crawl to make only that 
distance since early morning, as the road in use at that time was 
well worked and travelled. In face of the evidence that can be 
adduced to the contrary, before accepting this general belief that 
the army lay at Vealtown, it may be well for us to ascertain on 
what original authority this opinion is based. In all the writ- 
ings of those living at that time the only work I can find that 
definitely locates Lee's encampment that night is the '' Memoirs" of 
General James Wilkinson. This seems to be the sole authority 
from which historians have drawn their conclusions. Nowhere 
does Wilkinson mention in his book that he visited the army — 
or that he knew of his own knowledge the location of the encamp- 
ment — nor does he say from whom, or in what manner, he 
obtained his information. In estimating the historical value of 
his '' Memoirs " we may remember that they have not passed 
unscathed the test of criticism. Numerous defects can be 
pointed out in the pages relating his experiences during the 
earlier years of the Revolution. It must be borne in mind that 
at the time he witnessed Lee's misfortune he was but nineteen 
years old, and that sixty years elapsed before the work narrating 
the capture was published. It is not strange that errors should 
have crept in, and altogether we may fairly question the value 
of such testimony. From the facts heretofore given, together 



344 The Story of an Old Farm. 

with the traditions of the neighborhood, we are justified in 
reaching the conclusion that the encampment on the night of the 
twelfth of December was in Bedminster, and not in Bernards, 
township. 

Lee had supposed himself to be at least twenty miles distant 
from the enemy, and much surprise was felt that his proximity had 
been discovered by the British. On the previous afternoon Aaron 
Malick had occasion to visit New GermantOAvn, probably on bus- 
iness connected with the Lutheran church, and did not return 
till late in the evening. This was a time when no one was 
above the suspicion of disloyalty. When Wilkinson, or some 
other officer, reached the '' Stone House " on the morning of the 
thirteenth and found that Aaron had been absent the previous 
night, he was at once suspected of having informed the enemy of 
Lee's whereabouts. He was placed under arrest and rigidly 
examined, and was finally sent under guard to New Germantown 
to prove himself clear of any conspiracy, and to show that it was 
there he had been, rather than in the direction of the enemy. He 
had no difficulty in doing this, and was consequently released. 
On his way home, at the ^' round hill," about half a mile 
west of the Larger Cross Roads, he met what was now Sulli- 
van's command, pushing on towards the Delaware. While 
talking with some of the officers, the discharge of cannon was 
plainly heard which announced the arrival of Lee at New 
Brunswick. It was evidently late in the day before Sullivan 
had put his column in motion. The excitements incidental to 
the announcement of the capture of Lee had probably necessi- 
tated consultation and delay. When again on the march he did 
not follow the instructions brought from Lee by Major Scammel 
as to the route, and, instead of turning south toward Pluckamin, 
pursued a westerly course. He encamped that night — the 
thirteenth — at New Germantown, where he rested till eleven 
o'clock the next morning. From there no time was lost in 
marching to Pennsylvania, where he joined Washington, moving 
by way of Pittstowu and Phillipsburg, the latter place being 
reached on the night of the fifteenth at ten o'clock. 

The capture of Lee was discovered later to have been in a 
measure accidental. It seems that Elder Muklcwrath, of the 
Mendham Presbyterian church, had been with the general the 



The 16th British Light Dragoons. 345 

night before complaining that the troops had stolen one of his 
horses. On the following morning he fell in with a detachment 
of the 16th British light dragoons, under the command of 
Lieutenant-Colonel, the Honorable William Harcourt, afterwards 
the third Earl Harcourt, G. C. B., which was reconnoitering in 
the neighborhood. In some manner the elder divulged the 
proximity of Lee, and, it is said, either voluntarily or involun- 
tarily, guided the enemy to the general's quarters. Presbyter- 
ianism and patriotism were in such close alliance during the war 
that we are loth to believe that the elder willingly contributed to 
this catastrophe. This regiment of Harcourt's — called the 
Queen's Own — was considered the crack cavalry corps of the 
British forces. The men were mounted on fine horses sixteen 
hands high, and in addition to sabres were armed with carbines, 
the muzzles of which were thrust in a socket at the stirrup. 
Uniformed in scarlet coats faced with white, bright yellow buck- 
skin breeches, black boots and jangling spurs, their dashing and 
formidable appearance was heightened by polished brass helmets, 
from which chestnut hair flowed to the shoulders. 

When Lord Cornwallis failed to find boats with which to cross 
the Delaware and continue his pm'suit of the American army, he 
marched to Pennington, where he arrived on December tenth, 
remaining there four days. While at that place he was informed 
that troops under the command of General Lee were reported to 
be crossing Morris county on their way to reinforce the main 
army. He at once decided to dispatch a mounted patrol to gain 
intelligence of the strength and locality of this corps. Lieutenant- 
Colonel Harcom't applied for the direction of the detachment, 
and a volunteer for the expedition was Cornet Banastre Tarleton, 
afterwards famous — or infamous — in the southern campaigns. 
The infinite address with which Harcourt conducted this enter- 
prise to so brilliant an issue won for him high enconiums from his 
army and government. 

Washington's magnanimous soul could not see in Lee either a 
rival or an enemy. He had great confidence in his talents as a 
soldier, and deeply deplored his capture, deeming it a serious 
loss to the country. Many of the people also held extravagant 
notions as to Lee's merits, and the affair 'altogether was consid- 
ered a public calamity. His exchange and subsequent downfall 



346 The Story of an Old Farm. 

are well known. As he and his affairs have no further relations 
with Somerset county, the only additional reference I shall make 
to this singular man will be to cite the following extraordinary 
clause found in his will at his death, seven years later : — 

1 desire most earnestly that I may not be buried in any church, or cliurch- 
yard, or witliin a mile of any Presbyterian or Anabaptist Meeting House ; for 
since I have resided in this country I have kept so much bad company when liv- 
ing, that I do not choose to continue it when dead. 

Perhaps Lee had the Mendham elder in mind. 

As the close of the year 1776 drew near, our state's cup of mis- 
fortune would seem to have been full and overflowing. Its leg- 
islature had been driven by an approaching enemy from Prince- 
ton to Trenton, from Trenton to Bordentown, then on to Pitts- 
town, and from there to Haddonfield where it had dissolved 
on the second of December. The army, almost destroyed, had 
abandoned the state ; a general, high in the estimation of the peo- 
ple, had been captured, and the citizens in great numbers were 
going over to the enemy. We, whose patriotism and love of 
country have been fed by the inheritance of over a century of 
national feeling, can have but a small appreciation of the doubts 
and uncertainties that attacked our forefathers in those darkest 
days of the Revolution. That so few made their submission to 
the Crown is the wonder, not that so many shoidd have proved 
faint-hearted, and lost faith in the cause that seemed so promising 
but a short year before. It must be remembered that in the 
bays and harbors rode a lordly fleet, flying the flag that had 
been an object of aff'ection and reverence to the colonists. Dis- 
tributed throughout New Jersey was a thoroughly equipped and 
disciplined army, officered by veteran soldiers and supported by 
the prestige of a stable and powerful government. And upon 
what opposing powers and resources were our New Jersey ances- 
tors leaning ? Upon a continental congress that was totally with- 
out power or authority of enforcing its own edicts ; upon a col- 
lection of petty provinces inexperienced in self-rule, none of 
which possessed armories, strong fortresses, or works of any char- 
acter for fuiniishing the munitions of war; upon the ragged rem- 
nant of an army that had been driven across the state by a vic- 
torious enemy, an undisciplined force of raw recruits, com- 



The Equipoise of Washington's Character. 347 

mancled by a man better known in Virginia than in New Jersey, 
who was entirely without experience in the handling of large 
bodies of men, and who, since leaving Boston, had been defeated 
in all of his military enterprises. Time, the great average- 
adjuster, had not yet declared the retreat from Long Island to 
equal some of the most important victories in history. 

But the people believed in Washington. It was one of the 
peculiar attributes of the character of this remarkable man that 
throughout his entire career his mere presence invariably pro- 
duced a feeling of confidence. And now, notwithstanding the 
repeated defeats of the continental army, hardly an eye rested 
on his distinguished form but that reflected trust and veneration. 
Best of all, Washington believed in himself! During this period 
of gloom and perplexity the hopeful mind of the commander-in- 
chief was never more harassed with embarrassments. Yet, in 
the face of the fearful discouragements of the hour, he was firm 
in faith, and undaunted in his belief in the ultimate triumph of 
the American cause. The magnificent equipoise of such a char- 
acter was not easily disturbed. Even at this time, the serenity 
of his countenance gave no sign of the stupendous mental exer- 
tions he was making in order to triumph over seemingly over- 
whelming adversities. Two days after crossing the Delaware 
the number of his men was reduced to seventeen hundred, of 
whom hardly more than one thousand could be relied upon for 
effective service. But at once, with apparently unabated ardor, 
and by the most indefatigable exertions, Washington proceeded 
to build upon this nucleus of an army. By the twentieth of 
December his force had been augmented to nearly six thousand 
men. Proffered bounties, and personal solicitation and influence, 
had retained in the service soldiers whose time had expired ; the 
Pennsylvania militia had turned out in force ; regiments from 
Ticonderoga united with the army, and General Sullivan had 
brought up Lee's division. 

The crying evil that attached to the continental army during 
the first year of the war was the short term of enlistment. When 
hostilities actually commenced the people failed to realize that 
they were involved in a prolonged struggle, but thought a few 
months campaigning would result in the adjustment of all diffi- 
culties. At the beginning of the Revolution it was said that 



348 The Story of an Old Farm. 

forty thousand armed men could he brought to Boston within 
twenty-four hours, hy the displaying of a light on Beacon hill ; 
and when Washington took command at Cambridge, it was of an 
undisciplined f(trce nearly fifteen thousand strong. One year 
later, as we have seen, it was with difficidty that the general in 
his retreat across the Jerseys could keep together a mere hand- 
ful of men. Soldiers w^hose time had expired were too disheart- 
ened by hardships and repeated defeats to re-enlist ; while new 
recruits were not inclined to connect their fortunes in midwinter 
with an ill-clad, dispirited wreck of an army, which, without 
tents and much of the time without food, had just been driven 
from the Hudson to the Delaware by an exultant foe. In this 
matter of short enlistments we can hardly condemn the want of 
forethought in our forefathers, when we reflect that in the pres- 
ent generation the same error was committed at the breaking out 
of the late war. 

We left Washington in Pennsylvania repairing damages. 
The English commanders, Howe and Cornwallis, considered 
the war at an end, and the latter was preparing to sail for Eng- 
land on a furlough. The British were distributed in cantonments 
from the Raritan to the Delaware, under command of General 
Grant, New Brunswick being his headquarters and base of sup- 
plies. About fifteen hundred Germans and a squadron of Eng- 
lish cavalry were posted at Trenton under command of Colonel 
Rail, * and another body of Hessians was stationed at Bordento\vn 
under Count von Donop. No fears were entertained of the 
Americans, and the foreign officers, jubilant over recent successes, 
were preparing to spend the Christmas holidays with great jollity. 
And now, happily, a rift appears in the black cloud of disaster 
that has so long enveloped the American arms, and a bright 
gleam is about to illumine the page which records the close of the 
first year of our national independence. On the cold and sleety 
night of the twenty-fifth of December, when the Delaware was 
choked with ice, Washington crossed the river with twenty-five 
hundred men and twenty field-pieces. A patriot army, whose 



*This officer's name is commonly given in histories as Rulil, but the autograph 
collection of Dr. T. Addis Emmet of New York contains the signature of the 
Hessian colonel, wherein the name is plainly spelled Rail. 



The Affair at Trenton. 349 

achievements of that night and morning have been celebrated by 
poet, painter and historian ! The command was divided into 
two divisions under Generals Sullivan and Green, which took 
up their line of march for Trenton, eight miles away. On 
reaching Birmingham, distant from the town about four miles 
and a half, Sullivan's column continued down the river road, the 
other, under Green, filed to the left, and followed the Scotch road, 
which joined the Pennington road about a mile from Trenton. 
Washington was with the latter division. 

Owing to delays occasioned by the ice in the river and the 
slipperiness of the roads, it was eight in the morning before 
Greene reached the outposts of the enemy. They were soon 
driven in by the advance brigade under Lord Stirling, their 
commanding officer, a lad of but eighteen, being wounded. 
Sullivan's division, which had been guided by Captain Mott of 
the 3d New Jersey battalion, entered the westerly part of the 
town about the same time, and both commands pushed forward, 
keeping up a running fire on the retreating outposts. The sur- 
prise was complete. The Hessian officers, still in the midst of 
their Christmas festivities, were hardly in a condition to repel so 
sudden an attack. Colonel Rail had been engaged in playing 
cards with a convivial party of officers at the residence of a rich 
merchant, Abraham Hunt, on the northwest comer of King 
(Warren) and Second streets. A short time before the attack 
he had returned to his quarters considerably the worse for his 
night's festivities. On being aroused by his aide and apprised 
of the approach of the enemy the dumbfoimded colonel was 
quickly in the saddle and at the head of his troops, but before 
they could be completely formed the American* were on them 
with cannon and bayonet. A short and decisive engagement 
resulted in a complete success for Washington's army. His 
troops were so disposed as to surround the enemy, who had 
no choice between being cut to pieces or surrender. The 
British light-horse made their escape, but the less fortunate 
Hessians grounded their arms. According to an account pub- 
lished in the ''Philadelphia Post," of the twenty-eighth of Decem- 
ber, the capture included one colonel, two lieutenant-colonels, 
three majors, four captains, eight lieutenants, twelve ensigns, two 
surgeon-mates, ninety-nine sergeants, twenty-five drummers, 



350 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

nine musicians, twenty-five servants, and seven hundred and 
forty privates. In addition, the victorious Americans carried 
back with them to Pennsylvania three captured standards, six 
fine brass cannon, and about one thousand stand of arms. The 
continental forces had but four casualties, while the enemy's 
dead amounted to thirty men and six officers. The colonel com- 
manding, who was badly wounded, was placed on parole ; he 
died a few days later at the residence of Stacy Potts, on Warren 
street, at the head of Perry street, the grandfather of the late 
Judge Joseph C. Potts of Jersey City. The fortunes of war 
bring about strange contrasts. Among the Trenton captives 
was the Hessian band of music. On Christmas night, to 
heighten the pleasures of the foreign officers' festivities, it had 
played loud and long, confusion to all rebels. Six months later 
the same band furnished the music at the dinner given by 
congress at Philadelphia, celebrating the first anniversary of 
American independence. After each toast the German musicians 
were called upon for patriotic airs breathing a love of liberty 
and freedom ; their fine performances contributed greatly to the 
enjoyment of the occasion. 

It was intended that Colonel Cadwalader, who commanded a 
brigade of Pennsylvania Associators, and General Ewing with 
his division, should also have crossed the Delaware, but they were 
prevented by the ice. Otherwise there is but little doubt that 
the capture of von Donop and his force woiUd have been added 
to the brilliant achievements of this memorable December morn- 
ing. This affair of Trenton was considered, and properly so, a 
great victory. That at a time when the fortunes of Washington 
were at so low tn ebb he should have been able to achieve so 
signal a triumph, had a marked influence on the army and 
country, animating the people, and inspiring the troops with 
fresh courage. This was especially felt by the New Jersey citi- 
zens and militia, who to a certain extent had been witnesses of 
both the misfortunes and glories of the past thirty days. The 
effect upon the citizens was to again instil a belief in the availa- 
bility of their army and the ability of its commanding general. 
Again they grew confident in the ultimate success of the Ameri- 
can arms, and lost the foreboding, by which they had been 
attacked, that the contest in which their country was engaged 



The Country Encouraged. 



351 



was about hopeless. Surely the entire people had great cause 
for rejoicing, after the gloomy and trying experiences of their 
army since its first disaster on Long Island. 




CHAPTER XXV. 

The Hessians in New Jersey — Just a Little in Their Favor — 
A Correction of Some False Traditions That Have Been 
Fostered by Prejudiced Historians. 

On that cold day after Christmas, when the story of the battle 
of Trenton went flying from hamlet to farm over the hills and 
valleys of Somerset, the startling news was a matter of peculiar 
interest to the members of the family at the " Old Stone House." 
Their rejoicing over the victory of the Americans was tempered 
somewhat by the knowledge that the vanquished were Germans, 
and that some of them with but little doubt had been Aaron's 
fellow-townsmen in the old country. 

In a former chapter we have learned from a letter of the 
'* Herr Frceceptor " that previous to the year 1749, Bendorf 
was transferred from the sovereignty of its former owners to 
that of Margrave Karl Wilhchn Fredrich of Anspach. Charles 
Alexander, the son of this murdering margrave, in 1791 sold all 
his territory to Prussia for a pension. He it was who, when 
George HI. applied to the princes of Germany for troops to aid 
him in subduing his revolted American colonies, supplied the 
English government with three regiments, aggregating 2,353 
men, for which he received over five hundred thousand dollars. 
Among the enemy captured at Trenton was a portion of one of 
these regiments, and its flag taken on that day was afterwards 
deposited in the museum at Alexandria, Virginia, When this 
museum building was burned, a few years ago, the flag was 
destroyed together with that of Washington's life-guard and 
other interesting Revolutionary relics that had been placed there 
by G. W. P. Custis. It was the custom for German princes, in 
filling the ranks of battalions intended to be bartered to foreign 



German Auxiliaries Enumerated. 353 

governments, to secure recruits when possible from their outlying 
possessions rather than from their home dominions ; it is fair to 
presume, then, that Bendorf was obliged to furnish its full quota 
to the forces destined for America. Aaron was probably well- 
informed of these facts by his correspondents abroad, and 
though the news of the aflFair at Trenton may have added much 
to the happiness of the holiday season, yet he would have been 
quite wanting in sensibility had he reflected without concern 
upon the possibility of there being among the unfortunates who 
had been killed, wounded or captured, men who in their youth 
had been his playmates on the streets of his native town. 

When the British ministers learned that an American revenue 
could only be collected by 'force of arms, they had but little 
difficulty in finding German rulers who were willing to sacrifice 
their troops in a quarrel that did not concern them, provided they 
were well enough paid. Duke Ernest, the prince ruling Saxe- 
Gotha and Altenburg, though a relative of England's king, 
declined peremptorily the offer of the British ministers for 
troops. Bancroft tells us that when England applied to Frederic 
Augustus of Saxony, the prince promptly answered through 
his minister that the thought of sending a part of his army to 
the remote coimtries of the new world touched too nearly his 
paternal tenderness for his subjects, and seemed to be too much 
in contrast with the rules of a healthy policy. Charles Augustus 
of Saxcr Weimar declined to permit any of his subjects to recruit 
for service in America except vagabonds and convicts. This 
ruler, who was but nineteen years old, was doubtless influenced 
by the broad and generous spirit animating the counsels of his 
minister Goethe. Frederick the Great, also, to his credit be it 
said, condemned the practice of putting armies in the market, 
but other princes were only too glad to swell their treasuries 
at the cost of the loss of a few subjects. 

From Edward K. Lowell's valuable work "The Hessians in the 
Revolutionary War," we learn that the English government secured 
soldiers from five German rulers, besides that of Anspach-Bey- 
reuth ; Frederic II., Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, furnished 
16,992, of whom 10,492 returned home after the war ; from 
Charles I., Duke of Brunswick, were obtained 5,723, of whom 
returned 2,708 ; William, Count of Hesse-Hanau, 2,422, returned 

23 



354 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

1,441 ; Frederic, Prince of Waldeck, 1,225, returned 505 ; 
Frederic Augustus, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbest, 1,152, returned 
984. 

Of the troops furnished by the margrave who owned Bendorf, 
less than one-half again saw Germany. Jones, the tory histor- 
ian, avers that the British ministry stipulated to pay the German 
princes ten pounds for each man that did not return home at the 
close of the war ; for each wounded soldier, however slight the 
injury, five pounds were to be paid. Commandants were careful 
to report even the scratch of a finger, consequently, in 1786, 
when the bills came in from the German powers, the English 
were obliged to pay four hundred and seventy-one thousand 
pounds in settlement. Karl Schnizlein, '' Royal Bavarian 
Director of the General Court of Justice, and Secretary of the 
Historical Society for Mittelfranken, Germany," in a letter 
dated the twenty-eighth of September, 1887, assures me that 
the treaty between the British government and the Margrave 
Charles Alexander of Anspach differed materially from those 
made with the other German princes. This was especially so as 
to — as he expresses it — " paying premiums for perished soldiers." 
Furthermore, that the money allowed for the Anspachian- 
Beyreuthian troops by the British ministry was not to the per- 
sonal advantage of the margrave, but was paid into the treasury 
and used for the redemption of the indebtedness of the country, 
Mr. Schnizlein also states in his letter that while he does not 
know of any archives from which information can be obtained 
regarding enlistments in the troops that went to America, it is 
probable that among the subsidiary forces of the margrave there 
were men liable to serve as soldiers from the margraviate of 
Sayn-Altenkirchen (Bendorf). 

Just here it would seem eminently proper to say a few words 
in virKlication of the memory of these ovei'-maligned Hessians. 
It may fairly be considered within the scope of this work, which, 
after all, is the story of a German ancestry whose place of nativ- 
ity presumably furnished men to swell the ranks of the so-called 
mercenaries. The descendants of such an ancestry will surely 
acquiesce in an effort to relieve these people from a long-standing 
and unmerited obloquy. It is quite time that the name of the Ger- 
man auxiliaries of the English army in America was severed from 



The Jersey People Hate the Hessians. 355 

the odium attached to it for over a century past. Most of the 
barbarities and cruelties practiced upon the citizens of New Jer- 
sey by the entire British forces have been charged against the 
so-called Hessian troops, and it is only within a few years that 
some disposition has been shown to deal justly with the record of 
the conduct of the German soldiery. 

Hessians ! how they have been hated by the Jersey people ! 
the very name is still spoken by many with a prolonged hiss-s. 
For generations the word has been used even as a bug-a-boo 
with which to frighten children, and by the imperfectly read the 
German troops have been stigmatized as ^' Dutch robbers !" 
" Blood-thirsty marauders !" and " Foreign mercenaries !" Why 
blame these tools ? While many of them were not saints, 
neither were they the miscreants and incendiaries, bent on 
excursions of destruction and rapine, that the traditions fostered 
by prejudiced historians would have us believe. Many of these 
Germans were kindly souls, and probably the best-abused people 
of the time. Individually they were not mercenaries, and a 
majority of the rank and file without doubt objected as strongly 
to being on American soil fighting against liberty, as did their 
opponents to have them here. Some idea may be obtained of 
their repugnance to coming to this country from Schiller's pro- 
test against the custom of his countrymen's being sent across the 
seas in exchange for the gold of foreign governments. He tells 
how on one occasion upon orders being published directing a 
regiment to embark for the colonies, some privates, stepping out 
of the ranks, protested against crossing the ocean, and demanded 
of their colonel for how much a yoke the prince sold men I 
Whereupon, the regiment was marched upon the parade, and the 
malcontents there shot. To quote Schiller : — 

We heard the crack of the rifles as their brains'spattered the pavement, and 
the whole army shouted, " Hurrah for America !" 

Germany's despotic princes justified their human traffic with the 
specious plea that it is a good soldier's duty to fight when his 
country requires his services — that whether it is against an 
enemy of his own government or that of another, should not be 
considered or enter into his conception of allegiance. They 
argued that there is no boon so great as a full treasury, and 
when a subject contributed by enlistments to that end, he was 



356 The Story of an Old Farm. 

fulfilling the highest duty of citizenship. Their people, unfor- 
tunately, did not respond to such views of patriotism ; conse- 
quently, in securing recruits the most severe measures were nec- 
essary. Impressing was a favorite means of filling the regi- 
mental ranks ; strangers as well as citizens were in danger of 
being arrested, imprisoned, and sent off before their friends could 
learn of their jeopardy, and no one was safe from the grip of the 
recruiting officer. This is illustrated by an interesting account 
given by Johann Gottfried Leume, a Leipsic student, who was 
kidnapped while travelling, forced into the ranks of a moving 
regiment, and dispatched to America to fight England's battles. 
As every conceivable method of escape was devised by con- 
scripts, desertions were punished with great sevei'ity, though, as 
a rule, not with death, as the princes found that their private 
soldiers had too high a monetary value in Eui'opean markets to 
be sacrificed by the extreme penalty. 

In many principalities the laws obliged the towns and villages 
in which soldiers escaped,to supply substitutes from among the sons 
of their most prominent citizens, and anyone aiding a fugitive 
was imprisoned at hard labor, flogged, and deprived of his civil 
rights. Bancroft states that the heartless meanness of the Bruns- 
wick princes would pass belief if it was not officially authenti- 
cated. On learning of Burgoyne's surrender, they begged that 
their captured men might be sent to the West Indies rather than 
home, fearing that on reaching Germany their complaints would 
prove a damage to the government trade in soldiers. Notwith- 
standing the severe penalties visited on deserters, yet when the 
Anhalt-Zerbst regiments on their way to embark — 1228 strong 
— passed near the Prussian frontier, over three hundred deserted 
in ten days. In 1777, when the margrave of Anspach-Beyreuth 
wished to forward some recruits to America he was obliged to 
march the detachment unarmed to the point of embarkation on 
the Main, and while on the way the recruits were guarded by a 
trusted troop of yiigers. In spite of these precautions many 
escaped, and several were shot while making the endeavor. 

The late Frederick Kapp has contributed greatly to our 
knowledge of Hessian and Anspach soldiery. In regard to 
recruiting, he informs us that an officer in charge of a detach- 
ment of newly-enlisted men was directed, when on the march in 



Hessians Object to Fighting the Americans. 357 

the old country, to avoid large towns, also the vicinity of the 
place where any of the recruits had lived, or had been formerly 
stationed. So great precautions were considered necessary to 
prevent escape, that it was the duty of an officer when billeting 
at night with strangers to room with his men, and, after 
undressing, to deliver his weapons and the clothing of the entire 
party to the landlord or host. In the morning the men's cloth- 
ing was not to be brought in until the officer was completely 
dressed and he had loaded and primed his pistols. While en 
route should a recruit grow restive, or show signs of insubordi- 
nation, the instructions were to cut the buttons and straps from 
his trousers, forcing him to hold them up in walking, thus 
rendering flight impossible. Lieutenant Thomas Anburey, a 
British officer captured with Burgoyne, in a book descriptive of 
his experiences in America, has much to tell regarding the 
Hessian contingent of the northern army. We may suppose that 
his following recital as to the manner of foreign enlistments was 
based on information gained from German officers : — 

The Prince caused every place of worship to be surrounded during service, and 
took every man who had been a soldier, and to embody these into regiments he 
appointed old officers who hajl been many years upon half-pay, to command them, 
or on refusal of serving to forfeit their half-pay. Thus were these regiments 
raised, officered with old veterans who had served with credit and reputation in 
their youthful days, and who had retired, as they imagined, to enjoy some com- 
fort in the decline of life. 

This American service was especially objectionable to the 
Grermans because of their knowledge that our country was the 
home of many of their nationality. They did not wish to fight 
friends. Nor were their fears groundless, for in their first 
engagement after landing — the battle of Long Island — among 
Lord Stirling's troops opposed to them were three battalions, 
mostly composed of Pennsylvania Germans. These American 
troops were well uniformed and equipped, and looked so much 
like the mercenaries that at one time the English thought them 
to be Hessians, which error cost the British a colonel and eighty 
privates. That was not the first time that princely avarice had 
been the means of causing men from the valleys of the Rhine 
and its tributaries to contend with each other. Lowell recounts 
that in 1743 Hessians stood against Hessians, six thousand men 



358 The Story of an Old Farm. 

serving in the urmy of King George II., and six thousand in the 
opposing force of the Emperor Charles VII. 

When the news of the capture of the Hessians at Trenton 
spread through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the inhabitants 
thronged from every direction to view these beings whom they 
had been led to believe were monsters ; they were very much 
astonished to find them like ordinary men of German extraction. 
The people were filled with wonder, however, at their strangely 
martial appearance. Their officers, with embroidered coats and 
stiff carriages, were in strong contrast to the easy-going com- 
manders of the continental forces, while the men in their dress 
and accoutrements presented a very different appearance from that 
of the generally poorly clad and equipped soldiers of the young 
republic. This was especially true of the grenadiers. They 
wore very long-skirted blue coats which looked fine on parade, 
but were ill calculated for rapid marching ; a yellow waistcoat 
extended below the hips, and yellow breeches were met at the 
knee by black gaiters. A thick paste of tallow and flour 
covered the hair, which was drawn tightly back and plaited into 
a tail which hung nearly to the waist. Their moustaches were 
fiercely stiffened with black paste, whi^e above all towered a 
heavy brass-fronted cap. When in full marching order they 
must needs have had stout legs and broad backs to have sus- 
tained the weight they were forced to carry. In addition to 
cumbersome belts, a cartouche box, and a heavy gun, each man's 
equipment included sixty rounds of ammimition, an enormous 
sword, a canteen holding a gallon, a knapsack, blanket, haver- 
sack, hatchet, and his proportion of tent equipage. Max von 
Eelking, in his ^' Memoirs" of von Riedesel, translated by W. L. 
Stone, writes that the English officers said the hats and swords 
of the Brunswick dragoons were as heavy as the whole equip- 
ment of a British soldier. 

These Trenton captives were sent over the Delaware into 
Pennsylvania and quartered at Newtown. Lord Stirling, who 
was there, received the officers with much consideration, saying, 
" Your General de Heister treated me like a brother when I was 
a prisoner," [after the battle of Long Island] ; and so, gentle- 
men, will you be treated by me." Corporal Johannes Reuber, 
one of the captives, writes in his journal that in passing through 



The Courtesy of German Officers. 359 

the towns and villages the Grermans were upbraided and treated 
with contumely by the populace, which continued until Wash- 
ington caused notices to be posted throughout the vicinity, saying 
that the Hessians had been compelled to become combatants, and 
should be treated with kindness and not with enmity. The 
prisoners were very grateful to Washington for being allowed to 
retain their baggage, and for their generally kind treatment. 
In their gratitude for conduct so opposed to what they had 
expected, they called their illustrious conqueror " a very good 
rebel." 

General de Heister, referred to by Lord Stirling, was an old 
man who, after fifty years of service, yielded to the eai-nest 
entreaty of his personal friend, the landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, 
and consented to command the eighty-seven hundred Hessians 
who came to America to join Howe's army. During the pro- 
longed voyage the old gentleman exhausted his whole stock of 
tobacco and patience. From his transport he thus wrote to Sir 
George Collier of H. M. S. Rainbow, who commanded the con- 
voying war-ships : — 

I have been imposed on and deceived, for I was assured the voyage Avould not 
exceed six or seven weeks, — it is now more than fourteen since I embarked, and 
full three months since I left England, yet I see no more prospect of landing 
than I did a week after our sailing. I am an old man, covered with wounds, and 
imbecilitated by age and fatigues, and it is impossible I should survive if the 
voyage continues much longer. 

Sir George visited the veteran on his ship and raised his 
spirits by plentifully supplying him with fresh provisions and 
tobacco, and by assuring him that the voyage would soon termi- 
nate. The old German called upon his band to play, brought 
out some old hock, and Sir George left him quite exhilarated 
after drinking in many potations the health of the king, the 
landgrave, and many other friends. 

Of the German officers, Revolutionary literature teems with 
testimony as to their courtesy and good breeding ; and numerous 
instances could be given going to show that they often endeared 
themselves to the people that they were here ostensibly to sub- 
due. Among those of leading rank, de Heister, von Riedesel, von 
Donop, and von Knyphausen left on the communities most agree- 
able impressions. The latter was a man of honor, possessed a 
most kindly nature, and while stationed in Philadelphia won the 



360 The Story of an Old Farm. 

favorable consideration of the citizens. In appearance he was 
rather distinguished, erect and slender in figure, with sharp 
martial features. He was very polite, bowing to all respectable 
persons met on the street, and was fair and honorable in his 
dealings. In May, 1782, when this general in company with 
Sir Henry Clinton embarked from New York for England, a 
diarist of that time recites : " Knyphausen has the good wishes 
of all people, but Sir Henry leaves a poor character behind him." 
Bancroft characterizes von Riedesel as a man of honor and activ- 
ity ; and the same histoi'ian speaks of de Heister as a brave old 
man, cheerful in disposition, good-natured, bluntly honest and 
upright. Stone in his preface to von Eelking's " Memoirs" of von 
Riedesel says that the general '^ possessed all the qualities of a 
good and brave soldier," that '^ his love of justice was well- 
known," and that " his name honors not only his own 
state but also his common fatherland." Colonel von Donop 
it was who fell in the glacis of Fort Mercer, amid the 
great slaughter which the gallant but rash charge led 
by him had ensured. Colonel Greene, w^ho displayed much 
bravery in repulsing the enemy, was most humane in his treat- 
ment of the wounded that his cannon balls and grape shot had 
left piled in front of the fortification's double abattis. Among 
von Donop's last words before his death, which occurred a few 
days after the action, were : — 

I fall a victim to ray own ambition, and to the avarice of my prince ; bnt full 
of thankfulness for the good treatment I have received from my generous enemy. 

As to the Hessian officers of lesser rank, equally good tidings 
have come down to us. Mr. De Lancey, in his paper on Mount 
Washington and its capture, published in the first volume of the 
" Magazine of American History," avers that the Hessian officers 
in America were polite, courteous and almost without exception 
well educated ; he recites that as far as birth was concerned the 
English officers of Howe's army were much inferior in social 
rank to those of the Germans. Any rich Englishman could 
make his boy a gentleman by buying him a commission, but in 
Germany it was necessary for a youth to be one b}' birth if he 
aspired to be an officer. When the British army in 1776 occu- 
pied Manhattan Island, the troops were to a large extent billeted 
on the citizens. Mrs. Lamb recounts, in her " History of the 



Citizens Well-Teeated by Hessian Soldiers. 361 

City of New York," that Mrs. Thomas Clark, a widow lady, 
owned, and occupied with her daughters, an attractive country 
seat near Twenty-fifth street and Tenth avenue. She was 
greatly distressed because some Hessians were quartered on her 
property. Like every one else at that time she supposed them 
to be iniquitous persons, who would visit upon her family all 
manner of indignities. To Mrs. Clark's great relief, she found 
her apprehensions groundless ; nothing was disturbed, and the 
commanding officer proved not only to be a gentleman, but so 
considerate and agreeable that he became a favorite both with 
herself and her daughters. Early in the war, experiences of 
a like character were frequent. Mrs. EUet's '' Domestic 
History " tells that after Howe's army had advanced into West- 
chester county a Mrs. Captain Whetten, living near New 
Rochelle, noticed one day that a black flag had been set up near 
her house. Upon asking an English officer its meaning, she was 
much distressed by his replying ; — " Heaven help you, madame, 
a Hessian camp is to be established here." Her fears were 
unnecessary, as when the Germans arrived good feeling soon 
existed between them and the family. One of the officers was 
quartered in the house ; when night came Mrs. Whetten was 
about sending to some distance for clean sheets for his bed, when 
he protested against her inconveniencing herself on his account, 
saying, " Do not trouble yourself, madame, straw is good 
enough for a soldier." 

Graydon, in his "■ Memoirs," gives an account of his spending 
the winter of 1778, in Reading, Pennsylvania. There were 
there a number of officers, prisoners on parole, of whom he thus- 
speaks : — 

Among them were several Germans who had really the appearance of being 
what you would call down-right men. One old gentleman, a colonel, was a great 
professional reader, whom on his application I accommodated with books such as 
I had. Another of them, a very portly personage, was enthusiastically devoted 
to music, in which he was so much absorbed, as to seldom go abroad. But of all 
the prisoners, one Graff, a Brunswick officer, taken by General Gates' army, was 
admitted to the greatest privileges. Under the patronage of Dr. Potts, who had 
been principal surgeon in the Northern Department, he had been introduced tO' 
our dancing parties, and being always afterward invited, he never failed tO' 
attend. He was a young man of mild and pleasing manners. There was also a 
Mr. Stulzoe of the Brunswick dragoons, than whose, I have seldom seen a figure 



362 The Story of an Old Farm. 

more martial, or a manner more indicative of that manly openness which is sup- 
posed to belong to the character of a soldier. * 

It would be interesting to learn just how so deep-seated an 
aversion to the Hessians first became planted in the minds of the 
people, particularly in those of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. 
It could not have been because of their nationality, as among the 
populations of those states were many Germans who had always 
been appreciated as a worthy folk, quiet rather than bellicose in 
character. Yet, for some mysterious reason, these Teuton 
soldiers were looked upon with great dread by the inhabitants, 
especially by those who kncAv the least of them. The terror 
they inspired was often dissipated by a better acquaintance, as 
the private soldiers were found to be — with of course individual 
exceptions — simple-minded souls, and more afraid of their officers 
than of anything else. Mr. Onderdonk, in his *' Revolutionary 
Incidents," speaks of them as : — 

A kind, peaceable people, inveterately fond of smoking and of pea coffee ; 
their ofiences were of the sly kind, such as stealing at night, while the British 
and new raised corps were insolent, domineering, and inclined to violence and 
bloodshed. 

Gouverneur Morris in 1777 was ordered by the convention of 
the state of New York to prepare a narrative of the conduct of 
the British toward American prisoners. Among the papers sub- 
mitted was the affidavit of Lieutenant Troop of the militia, which 
recited that " he and other officers confined on Long Island were 
much abused by nearly all of the British officers and in their 
presence by the soldiers ; they were insulted and called rebels, 
scoundrels, villains and robbers : " that when imprisoned at 
Flatbush they were given so short allowance of biscuits and salt 
pork ^' that," to use his own words, " several of the Hessian sol- 
diers took pity on their situation and gave them some apples, and 
at one time some fresh beef, which much relieved them." The 
following extract is from a letter written by Washington at Mor- 
ristown on the fifth of February, 1777, to Samuel Chase, one of 

* The " Graff" spoken of by Graydon was Cornet Auguste Ludwig Lucas 
Griife of the Brunswick dragoons ; after the peace he remained a year in America, 
when he returned to Germany where he died as governor of Mecklenberg-Stre- 
litz. The Mr. Stulzoe of the Brunswick dragoons was Cornet Johann Balthasar 
Stutzer, who died at Bruubwick, Germany, in 1821, as a jjensioned lieutenant- 
colonel. 



Good Hearted German Soldiers. 363 

a committee of seven appointed by congress to inquire into the 
conduct of the British and Hessian officers toward American 
soldiers and toward the citizens of New York and New Jersey : — 

I shall employ some proper person to take the depositions of people in the dif- 
ferent parts of the province of New Jersey, who have been plundered after hav- 
ing taken protection and subscribed the Declaration. One thing I must remark 
in favor of the Hessians, and that is, that our people, who have been prisoners, 
generally agree that they received much kinder treatment from them than from 
the British officers and soldiers. The barbarities at Princeton were all commit- 
ted by the British, there being no Hessians there. 

Max von Eelking, in his "■ Die Deutschen Hulfsfruppen in 
Nordamerikanischen Befrcmngskriege, 1776 bis 1783," speaks of 
the effect that the landing of the Hessians on Long Island had 
upon the inhabitants. After telling that they were in great awe 
of the Germans and that many fled on their approach, he goes on 
to say : — 

When the first fear and excitement among the population had subsided, and 
people had become aware that after all they had not to deal with robbers and 
anthropophagi, they returned to their homes, and were not a little surprised to 
find not only their dwellings as they left them, but also the furniture, their 
effects, aye, even their money and trinkets. The fact was that the Germans, used 
to discipline, did not ask for more than they were entitled to. Their mutual 
relations now took a more friendly form, and it was not a rare case that a 
thorough republican would treat the quartered soldier like one entitled to 
his hospitality, and carefully nurse the sick or wounded one. 

During the winter of 1776, there was living at Burlington, a 
Mrs. Margaret Morris, who recorded her experiences in a journal 
of which a few copies were printed for private circulation. When 
Count von Donop's command penetrated as far as Mount Holly, 
she, in common with every one else, was at first much exer- 
cised over the proximity of the abhorred Hessians. On the sev- 
enteenth of December the following entry was made in her 
diary : — 

A friend made my mind easy by telling me that he had passed through the town 
where the Hessians were said to be ' playing the very mischief ; it is certain there 
were numbers of them at Mount Holly, but they behaved very civilly to the 
people, excepting only a few persons who were actually in rebellion, as they 
termed it, whose goods, etc., tliey injured. 

In the ^' Personal Recollections of the American Revolution," 
edited by Sidney Barclay, there appears the journal of a lady 
who made her home with her father, a clergyman, in the centre of 



364 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

Long Island, while her husband was with Washington's array. 
An entry of January, 1777, recites : — 

The soldiers [Hessian] take so much notice of the children that I fear lest 
they should contract evil, especially Charles. They have taught him to speak 
their language, he understands nearly all their conversation. They make pretty 
willow baskets for Marcia and Grace, and tell them of their own little ones at 
home, over the stormy ocean. The children are fond of them, and the}' feel no 
enmity toward them. What is more melancholy than the trade of a hired 
soldier ! I deeply commiserate their wretched lot. 

This little domestic scene hardly pictures the Germans in the 
guise of wicked marauders. The same diarist, in writing in 
1783 of the evacuation of the island by the Hessians, says 
further : — 

Many of the poor creatures have formed attachments, and the ties of kindness 
and gratitude are hard to break. Many of them begged to be permitted to remain 
in some menial capacity, but the ties of kindred prevailed with the greater part. 

The journal of Captain Pausch, chief of the Hesse Hanau 
artillery during the Burgoyne campaign, thus speaks of the 
behaviour of the privates of that command : — 

They never fail after reveille and tatoo, to make their offerings to their God by 
singing morning and evening hymns ; one hour afterwards they give themselves 
up to enjoyment, but in such a manner as to never give cause for complaint or 
punishment. 

The journal of John Charles Philip von KrafFt, free corporal 
in Lieutenant-Colonel Hinter's company in von Donop's regi- 
ment of Hesse-Cassel musketeers, furnishes a most interesting 
glimpse of the daily inside life in a German regiment which 
served in America as a contingent to the British army. Von 
Krafft makes many comments on Hessian forbearance as com- 
pared with British marauding. In speaking of the march across 
the Jerseys in 1778, he tells of entering a house near Freehold 
when he was informed by its occupants that some English 
soldiers had just stripped them of everything, even taking the 
silver buckles from a woraati's shoes. This woman said to him 
that " she saw very plainly there was no truth in what people 
had told her of the Hessians, namely, that they were cruel. She 
saw that it was the English alone." These people gave von KrafFt 
some fresh provisions, including a rooster and three chickens 
which had been concealed in an oven. They would not name a 
price, but he gave them one shilling and ten-pence English 



Hessian Excesses have been Exaggerated. 365 

money, for which they wished him many blessings, and begged 
him to pick some cherries from the trees in the dooryard. On 
the twenty-sixth of June he reached Freehold and found, to 
quote from the journal : — 

Every place here was broken into and plundered by the English soldiers. 
The church, which was made of wood and had a steeple, was miserably 
demolished. 

He recites that his regiment halted for an hour and a half on 
the main street of Freehold, during which time the English 
soldiers had : — 

Been breaking and destroying everything in the city hall house, even tearing 
down the little bell in the steeple. No Hessian was to be seen among them, 
the commanders of regiments not allowing it. 

He acknowledges, however, that some abuses were secretly 
practised by his countrymen. In September, 1 778, in writing of 
his experiences while on a foraging party near the twenty- 
mile stone in Westchester county^ New York, von Krafft 
says : — 

We were not forbidden to get provisions, but very strictly admonished not to 
take anything from the people in their houses. * * * For a few days we had 
an abundance of food, and this was my only booty. 

Did space permit, much further of interest could be drawn 
from the journal of this Hessian soldier. It can be found among 
the collections of the New York Historical society. 

The Marquis de Chastellux, in writing of the capitulation at 
Yorktown, speaks of the contemptuous attitude of the captured 
British soldiers toward the Americans. They made friends 
with the French, but in their chagrin and disappointment held 
aloof from the hated rebels. Says ChasteUux : — 

After the surrender the English behaved with the same overbearing insolence 
as if they had been conquerors ; the Scots wept bitterly, while the Germans only 
conducted themselves decently, and in a manner becoming prisoners. 

The bitter feeling evinced by the people toward the subsidiary 
troops of the English army was probably engendered by 
their conduct at the battle of Long Island. Their excesses 
have been greatly exaggerated by early historians in accounts 
•of that action ; it is gratifying, therefore, to read in one 
of Professor John Fiske's latest historical contributions, refer- 



366 The Story of an Old Farm. 

ring to this battle, that " the stories of a wholesale butchery 
by the Hessians which once were current have been completely 
disproved." There is no doubt, however, that during that 
engagement the Germans were guilty of some unnecessary 
cruelties, but any fair-minded person familiar with all the facts 
must admit that the circimistances of ignorance and false teach- 
ing palliate to a certain extent their behavior on that occasion. 
The Long Island Historical Society, in its account of the battle, 
publishes the letter of an officer in Fraser's Scotch battalion, 
from which I make the following extract : — 

The Hessians and our brave Highlanders gave no quarter, and it was a fine 
sight to see with what alacrity they dispatched the rebels with bayonets after we 
had surrounded them so that they could not resist. We took care to tell the 
Hessians that the rebels had resolved to give no quarter to them in particular: 
which made them fight desperately, and put all to death who fell into their 
hands. 

The statement of this bloodthirsty Highland officer is corrob- 
orated by the before referred to historian, Max von Eelking. 
He records : — 

That the Hessians were very much exasperated and furious, is not to be denied ; 
* * * the course pursued by the Hessians was urged upon them by the Brit- 
ons. Colonel von Heeringen says on this subject, in his letter to Colonel von 
Lossburg : "The English soldiers did not give much quarter and constantly 
urged our men to follow their example." 

Another officer, who was present at that time, narrates that 
the Germans early learned enough English to beg for quarter 
from the savage rebels, of whom they stood in great fear. They 
acted as if they were going to be eaten, and some of them when 
taken, bawled out as best they could, " Oh ! good rebel man, 
don't kill poor Hessian ! " 

That the heart of the Hessians was not in the work of aiding 
in the subjugation of Great Britain's colonists is proven by the 
fact of their frequent desertions. It is estimated that of the 
nearly thirty thousand German troops brought to America by 
the English, more than five thousand deserted, many of them 
becoming valued citizens of the country ; and frequent instances 
can be shown of their descendants ranking among the leading 
people of the United States. Judge Jones, in his " History of 
New York," avers that Henry Ashdore was the first in America 
of the name now so well known under its anglicized form of 



Hessian Deserters. 367 

Astor. He was a peasant from Waldorf in Baden, who came to 
this country with the British during the Revolutionary war, but, 
after a short period managed to escape their service, and entered 
into that of the ''Art and Mystery of Butchering." Upon the 
cessation of hostilities he induced his yoiuigest brother — then a 
youth of twenty — to come to New York. This was John Jacob 
Astor, who died in 1848 the richest man of his day in America. 
J. G. Rosengarten, in a paper read before the Newport His- 
torical Society in 1886 informs us that the ancestor of Greneral 
George A. Custer was a Grerman soldier, named Kuster, who 
was among those captured by Gates in 1777. He settled in 
Pennsylvania, but subsequently removed to Maryland, where the 
distinguished general's father was born in 1806. 

John Conrad Dochlar, an Anspach sergeant, in enumerating 
in his diary the German troops made prisoners at Yorktown, 
mentions the " Prince Royal " regiment of Hesse-Cassel, as 
having once been strong, " but now a great sufferer from death 
and desertion"; and the Anspach-Beyreuthian regiments as 
having had " about forty killed and wounded, besides losing tifty 
deserters." While Burgoyne's captured army was quartered 
at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1778, many of von Riedesel's 
soldiers deserted, and enlisted in Armand's light-corps then being 
recruited at Boston. During the month of April forty-five 
men escaped, while in May the Brunswickers lost seventy-two 
soldiers. When the convention army started for Virginia in 
November fifty Germans deserted before reaching the Hudson. 
The auxiliary troops, while en route south, entered New Jersey on 
the fourth of December, halting for the night of the fifth at Sussex 
Court-house. While marching through Stillwater township, in Sus- 
sex county, a dozen or more ''Hessians" escaped and hid until all 
the prisoners and their guards had passed by. They settled per- 
manently in the township, and several well-known families in that 
neighborhood are the posterity of these German soldiers. In Mor- 
ris county also, there are a number of resident families descended 
from thirty Hessians who at one time during the Revolution 
were employed at the Mount Hope mine. Lieutenant Anburey 
of Burgoyne's army — before quoted — in describing the march 
of the captured troops to Virginia, thus speaks of Germans who 
deserted : — 



"368 The Stoky of an Old Farm. 

Seeing in what a comfortable manner tlieir countrymen lived, they left us in 
great numbers as we marched through New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. 

Washington, in a letter from Englishtown on the day after the 
battle of Monmouth, writes that thus far Sir Henry Clinton in 
his march through the Jerseys had lost by desertion five or six 
hundred men, " chiefly foreigners." Six days later General 
Arnold, who had been left in command at Philadelphia, reported 
that five hundred and seventy-six deserters had reached that 
city, of whom fom' hundred and forty-six were Germans. 
The journal of von Krafft recites that there were so many 
desertions among his countrymen during the retreat across the 
Jerseys that General von Knyphausen announced, through his 
regimental commanders, that the men must not believe the 
*' statements in circulation that the rebels would give plantations 
and houses to those who remained behind." This general, as a 
warning to the troops, as they marched by caused a deserter to be 
hanged on a tree by the road, ^' which caused a dreadful uproar." 
When the English marched out of Philadelphia they were but 
eleven thousand strong. When Howe landed at the head of Elk 
he had eighteen thousand men. As a writer of that time says : — 

This terrible diminution can be only accounted for by the spirit of desertion, 
which, among the Hessians, prevailed to a very great degree. 

General Greene, in a letter to John Adams written from 
Basking Ridge in March, 1777, thus speaks of the Germans 
captured at Trenton : — 

The mild and gentle treatment the Hessian prisoners have received since they 
have been in our possession has produced a great alteration in their dispositions. 
Desertions prevail among them. One whole brigade refused to fight or do duty, 
and were sent prisoners to New York. Rancor and hatred prevail between them 
and the British soldiery. 

From Lossing we learn that of the officers captured at Tren- 
ton, Ensign Carle Fried Frurer, of the Knyphausen regiment, 
and Ensign Kleinsmith, joined the American army ; and the his- 
torian Onderdonk claims that many leading families of Long 
Island trace their descent from deserters from the ranks of the 
mercenary troops. Von Eelking mentions by name twelve offi- 
cers of the Brunswick contingent who settled permanently in 
America. Among them were six who remained by permission 
after the peace, two who returned home but came back to this 



An Astute German Baker. 369 

country, and four who deserted during the war. The latter 
included Chaplain Carl Melsheimer of the dragoon regi- 
ment. On the Sunday after the battle of Princeton, Gene- 
i-al Maxwell with some Jersey militia came out of the Short 
Hills, and falling suddenly on the British post at Elizabethtown, 
made prisoners of tifty Waldeckers and forty Highlanders. A 
writer who describes this affair in a letter dated at Philadelphia 
on the sixteenth of January, recites : — 

The English troops at Elizabethtown would not suffer the Waldeckers to stand 
sentry at the outposts, several of them having deserted and come over to us. 

At the time of the battle of Germantown there was living in 
that place a rich German baker, named Christopher Ludwick. 
Having learned that among the prisoners taken during that 
engagement were eight Hessians, this patriotic baker conceived 
the idea of putting his unfortunate countrymen to a more valu- 
able service than that of being guarded or paroled. He went to 
headquarters and induced the commander-in-cbief to place these 
men completely in his hands, the only proviso being that there 
should come to them no bodily harm. He then constituted him- 
self their host and guide, and taking them all about Philadelphia 
and its vicinity, showed them how the Germans were prospering 
in this country ; how comfortably they were housed, what fine 
churches they had, with what freedom and independence they 
followed their avocations, and with what happiness those in the 
humbler pursuits of life were living. This wise custodian then 
dismissed his prisoners, charging them to return to their regi- 
ments and inform their fellow-soldiers of all that they had seen, 
^nd explain to them the happiness awaiting those who would 
desert and settle in Pennsylvania. . The seed thus planted bore 
rich fruit. It is said that among the deserters resulting from 
this action, numbers afterward became prosperous citizens of 
Philadelphia. Ludwick's success in this enterprise encouraged 
him to further endeavors in the same direction ; he visited a 
Hessian camp on Staten Island, and without detection succeeded 
in causing several soldiers to flee to Pennsylvania. This honest 
German afterward became baker-general to the American army. 
He is said to have often been a visitor at headquarters, where 
Washington recognized his worth, and appreciated to the full the 
value of his services. 
24 



370 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Speaking of General Washington brings to mind the fact that, 
while living in Philadelphia as chief magistrate of the nation, his 
coachman was an ex-Hessian soldier. It was one of the events 
of the week to see '' Fritz," seated on the box of the executive's 
carriage, drawing up his four bright bays on Sunday morning in 
front of Christ church. He was tall and muscular, looking the 
soldier, his long aquiline nose pressing closely down over a 
fierce moustache. In a livery of white, touched with red, he 
carried himself with an important air, showing a severe coun- 
tenance under his cocked hat, which was worn square to the 
front, but thrown a little back on his queue. Washington's 
arrival at church was always the occasion of an enthusiastic but 
a quiet and respectful ovation. Long before the hour he was 
expected Second street woidd be packed with a patient throng 
of citizens. On the approach of the well-known white coach, 
ornamented with medallions, the crowd silently opened a narrow 
way or lane from the curb to the church door, and, as the presi- 
dent stepped with calm dignity from the carriage, profound sil- 
ence reigned, every eye being riveted on the distinguished form. 
As Washington, stately in person and noble in demeanor, slowly 
moved across the pavement toward the sacred edifice, it was an 
impressive spectacle. From the dense crowd there came not a 
sound, but the respectful silence in which the assembled multi- 
tude stood in the presence of the "father of his country," testi- 
fied more strongly than Avould have the bravest shouts, or the 
loudest acclamations, to the admiration and veneration with 
which they viewed this " greatest, purest, most exalted of 
mortals." 




CHAPTER XXVI. 

Washington^ March from Trenton to Morristown — The Battles 
of Assunpink and Princeton — The American Army 
Encamped at PlucJcamin — Death and Burial of Captain 
William Leslie. 

With the turn of the year 1776-'77 important events rapidly 
succeeded each other. Naturally one would say that the history 
of this time will make trite reading, but the occurrences of the 
next few weeks are too closely identified with the experiences 
of Bedminster people to be passed over without a somewhat 
extended notice. In addition, an endeavor will be made in this 
chapter to present some facts and incidents that have hitherto 
escaped the attention and knowledge of the ordinary Revolution- 
ary student. It is not my purpose to tell over again the well- 
known stories of Assunpink and Princeton, but rather to dwell 
on the many minor scenes and events connected with the march 
of the continental army from the second to the sixth of January, 
1777 ; to relate some details of interest that historians generally 
have been forced to pass by, in order to dilate on the two noted 
engagements which at that time entirely altered the current of 
American history. While the foundation and continuity of the 
narration cannot be preserved without mentioning these actions, 
yet, whatever of interest and value may follow will be due to the 
lesser historical gleanings presented, which may be said to be, to 
some extent, the result of an intimate knowledge of the locality in 
which the scenes are depicted, and a lifelong acquaintance with 
its people. 

The Christmas holidays of the year 1776, which will ever be 
considered one of the great epochs in American history, com- 
pletely changed the aspect of the Revolutionary contest. Sir 



372 The Stoky of an Old Farm. 

William Howe and Lord Cornwallis, astounded at the news from 
Trenton, were at once alive to their error in thinking that Amer- 
ican independence was a matter of the past. Abandoning his 
proposed home voyage, Cornwallis hastily marched his troops 
toward the Delaware, being joined on the way by Count von 
Donop's force from Bordentown. The British column, five 
thousand strong, reached Trenton late on the afternoon of the 
second of January. Washington was already there with nearly 
an equal number of men, although his army was largely com- 
posed of undisciplined, ununiformed militia. Intent on reoccupy- 
ing if not recapturing New Jersey, he on the thirteenth of 
December had again crossed the Delaware. 

Cornwallis on reaching Princeton had Avith him about eight 
thousand men. Leaving fifteen hundred there under Lieutenant 
Colonel Mawhood, and dispatching General Leslie with fifteen 
hundred more to Maidenhead, he marched with the remainder on 
the morning of the second, intent on annihilating Washington's 
ragged army. The American general, to check this advance, on 
the evening of New Year's day sent out a strong force of rifle- 
men and artillery under Generals de Fermoy and Adam Stephen. 
They met the enemy on the following morning, arresting their prog- 
ress for nearly two hours, then falling back toward the Delaware 
continued harassing and impeding the hostile march, until it was 
nearly dark before the British faced the main body of the Amer- 
icans at Trenton. After sunset the enemy advanced in two 
heavy bodies to the north side of Assunpink creek in order to 
force the bridge, but from the opposite shore the American dogs 
of war barked from their iron throats a dubious welcome. The 
enemy's attempt to force a passage of the stream was defeated 
by the effective manner in which General Knox handled his 
artillery, which was advantageously planted on the high southern 
bank of the creek. Owing to the lateness of the hour Cornwallis 
retired to the rear of the town, on the Princeton road, deciding 
to await daylight before renewing the attack, and when, as he 
boasted, " he would catch that old fox Washington." The 
British general's confidence in what the morrow would bring 
forth proved to be misplaced. From time immemorial a fox has 
been the most uncertain of all game, and Lord Cornwallis had 
quite neglected to remember that it was not uncommon for 



The Night of Assunpink. 373 

that wary animal, when just about trapped, to quietly steal 
away. 

Frederick the Great, on being told that a distinguished gen- 
eral had never made a mistake, replied, " then he must have 
fought very few campaigns." If Washington could ever be 
charged with a lack of military judgment it was when he placed 
his army in the position it occupied on this night of the second 
of January. Realizing his dangerous situation he was full of 
anxiety. Should an engagement follow the dawn, defeat woidd 
mean the destruction or capture of the entire continental force, 
the troops being so disposed as to ren^Jer a retreat impracticable. 
An engagement was certainly to be expected, the chances of suc- 
cess lying almost wholly with the enemy, as opposed to the raw 
levies of the Americans was the flower of the British army. 
Washington's decision was promptly reached, a decision that 
was probably as important in its immediate results and in its 
future effect upon the destinies of the country, as was any he was 
called upon to make during his entire career. The British 
had left at Princeton the 17th, 40th and 55th Regiments of 
infantry and three squadrons of dragoons. They were to join 
Cornwallis in the morning, but could they be reached by the 
Americans before that time their destruction was not impossible. 
Washington, calling his generals together, disclosed his plan, 
which was to move quietly around the enemy's flank, and march- 
ing rapidly on Princeton, strike a telling blow in that unexpected 
quarter. 

It has been said that this strategy was the suggestion of 
General St. Clair, but Stryker, in his " Princeton Surprise," 
contributed to the '' Magazine of American History," has 
conclusively proved this claim to be groundless, and such 
excellent authorities as Gordon and Bancroft insist that the 
idea was the conception of the chief. Be this as it may, 
the movement was quickly executed Silently sending off the 
impedimenta in the direction of Bordentown, the camp-fires were 
brightened, and pacing sentinels were left on guard, whose fre- 
quent challenges deluded the outposts of the enemy. Soon after 
midnight the ragged but heroic army broke camp, St. Clair's 
brigade leading the way. The other commands following, they 
pushed out far east of and around the sleeping British soldiers y 



374 The Story of an Old Farm. 

in the deep stillness of the night, along a narrow new road 
through the woods, the troops silently defiled over the frozen 
ground, their departure entirely unsuspected by the enemy. 

In speaking of Revolutionary armies such terms as corps, 
divisions and brigades are not always applied in the sense of their 
present uses. To mention a division does not imply a command 
made up of the full number of regiments and brigades. When 
Baron Steuben assumed the duties of inspector-general at Valley 
Forge, in March, 1778, he found that the term division, brigade, 
and regiment did not convey an idea upon which a calculation 
could be based as to the strength of the army. In some instances 
a regiment was stronger than a brigade. Disorder and con- 
fusion I'cigned supreme, and the continual coming and going of 
men enlisted for three, six and nine months made it impossible 
to preserve intact either a company or a battalion. To quote 
his own words : " I have seen a regiment consisting of thirty 
men and a company of one corporal." There was no uniformity 
of formation except in the line of march, and as to manual, each 
colonel had a system of his own. With this little force that was 
stealing through the dark gloom of the forests toward Prince- 
ton there were at least eleven generals, although the entire army 
barely aggregated a modem brigade. The number of commis- 
sioned officers was also out of all proportion to the non-commis- 
sioned officers and enlisted men. As a rule, the line, field and 
staff of a regiment or battalion had under them but a handful of 
soldiers. 

So far as I can learn, of this devoted band but few organiza- 
tions of foot were completely uniformed and equipped. One was 
the Dover light-infantry, clad in green faced with red, which 
was a militia company raised in the northern district of Kent 
covmty, Delaware, and commanded by Captain Thomas Rodney; 
the second was four light-infantry companies of Philadelphia 
militia under Captain Greorge Henry. A third uniformed organi- 
zation was Colonel William Smallwood's battalion, a mere 
fragment — barely seventy men — of what in the preceding June 
had been a noble regiment, eleven hundred strong, composed of 
the finest youth of Maryland. On the twentj'-seventh day of the 
preceding August, at a point in Brooklyn where now Fifth 
avenue and Tenth street intersect, the men of this command. 



The Brave Colonel Haslet. 375 

together with Colonel Haslet's Delaware regiment, held the 
enemy in check at a severe loss to themselves, while the rest of 
the regiments of Lord Stirling's division were making their 
escape from a most dangerous position. Three times they 
rallied and charged the enemy, knowing the residt must be their 
own sacrifice, yet willing to suffer at so great a cost in order 
that while holding the British at bay their comrades could 
make good their retreat. The combat over, two hundred and 
fifty-six of these Maryland lads were either lying among the 
dead and dying, or with their general, Lord Stirling, were in 
the hands of the enemy. The carnage had not been in vain, as 
the flying Americans were saved from complete destruction. 
Washington, choking with emotion, witnessed this bravery from 
a little redoubt within the present boundaries of Court, Clinton, 
Atlantic and Pacific streets, and the courage and self-devotion of 
this handful of young soldiers were the admiration of both armies. 
The battalions now marching toward Princeton were all 
similarly reduced. The Rhode Island and Virginia regiments 
had been greatly depleted ; of the latter. Colonel Scott's com- 
mand was but a corporal's guard, while Weedon's, which was 
probably the strongest battalion with the army, had less than 
one hundred and forty men fit for duty. 

The 1st Delaware regiment, under the brave Colonel Haslet, 
also made a name for itself at the battle of Long Island, but at a 
fearful cost. Its strength, which at the outset had been a full 
thousand, mustered during the retreat across the Jerseys but 
one hundred and five men. The time for which this command 
was enlisted expired on the first of January, and most of the 
ofiicers and men returned home in the hope of securing positions 
in the new continental regiments that were there forming. Six 
of them, however, refused to overlook the necessities of the situ- 
ation and abandon the continental army on the eve of an engage- 
ment. On the night march we are describing this 1st Delaware 
regiment had consequently dwindled to Colonel Haslet, Captain 
Holland, Doctor Gilder, Ensign Wilson and two privates. The 
colonel was made second in command of Gfeneral Mercer's 
brigade which numbered all told about four hundred men. As 
this spirited and distinguished young officer rode by the side of 
his troops, encouraging the soldiers in their hurried march, he 



376 The Story of an Old Farm. 

little thought that in a few short hours, with the coming of the 
dawn, lie would be called upon to lay his young life on the altar 
of his country. 

The only mounted force then with the army was the 1st 
Troop of Philadelphia light-horse, commanded by Captain 
Morris. It was a militia company composed of twenty-one 
gentlemen of independent fortunes, whose services during 
their tour of duty were invaluable to the commander-in-chief. 
They furnished him with couriers, guards, patrols and videttes, 
and when discharged on the twenty-thii'd of January Washing- 
ton tendered them his sincere thanks for the effective aid they 
had rendered the army. With each discharge was a testimonial 
which asserted that though the members were gentlemen of 
wealth they had shown a noble example of discipline and sub- 
ordiijation, and in several actions had manifested a spirit and 
bravery which would ever do honor to themselves, and be grate- 
fully remembered by their chief. 

Among the artillery that was jolting and rumbling over the 
stumps and frozen ruts on this cold January night was a New 
Jersey command known as the ^' Eastern Battery" of state troops, 
which a month before had been assigned to Colonel Procter's 
artillery regiment in General Knox's brigade. Early in the war, 
owing to the exposed situation of New Jersey, and to its lying 
between the two prominent cities that were likely to be the 
strongholds of the enemy, it was found necessary to organize a 
force for the protection of the inhabitants. These troops were 
volunteers from the county militia, and were known as " New 
Jersey Levies " and " State Troops." Though primarily intended 
for home protection, they were required, when called upon, to 
serve beyond the borders of the state. The first organization of 
these lines authorized by the provincial congress were sta- 
tioned in the eastern and western divisions of the state. Among 
the officers of the Eastern Battery were Captain Frederick Fre- 
linghuysen and Second-Lieutenant John Van Dyke. This bat- 
tery did excellent service on the banks of the Assunpink and at 
Trenton on the morning after Christmas. Its men also won the 
commendation of their general for the manner in which they 
served their guns at the battles of Princeton and ^lonmouth. 
Lieutenant Van Dyke of this command was a native of Eliza- 



The Battle of Princeton. 377 

bethtown, and his war experiences were rich and varied in char- 
acter. When the time of service of this New Jersey battery- 
expired he became an officer in Colonel Lamb's artillery regi- 
ment of the New York line. While taking a short sea voyage^ 
when on a furlough owing to illness, he was captured by the 
enemy and spent some time on the prison ship, "Jersey." He was 
one of the officers who walked with Andre to the gallows, and 
his pen has furnished us with a very full account of the incidents 
of that unhappy expiation. 

Captain Frelinghuysen retired from the artillery in May, 
1776, being succeeded in the command of the battery by 
Captain Daniel Neil, which officer, like Colonel Haslet, was 
now marching to his death. Frelinghuysen was still with 
the army and participated in this Princeton surprise, hav- 
ing in November been appointed brigade-major on the staff of 
General Dickinson of the New Jersey militia. He was cam- 
paigning in a familiar country, having graduated from the college 
of New Jersey six years before at the early age of sixteen. 
There were other " Princeton men " with the continental troops, 
among them Surgeon Benjamin Kush of the class of 1760, and 
Colonel Joseph Reed — a native of Trenton — whose parchment 
was dated in 1757. The latter was a member of Washington's 
military family. Doctor Rush, who was a well-known physician 
of Philadelphia, was serving as a volmiteer surgeon with the 
Pennsylvania militia. Von Moltke claims geography to be the 
most important factor in the science of war. These two staff 
officers, because of their local knowledge of the vicinity, are 
said to have contributed greatly to the brilliant success of that 
momentous winter's day, which a rising sun and this little army 
were about to make historic. 

The morning of the third of January was clear and cold. A 
white hoar-frost sparkled and glittered on the fields, and the 
branches of the trees were gemmed with buds of ice. Soon 
after daybreak the people in the vicinity of Princeton were 
awakened by the noise of musket-shots. File-firing commenced 
pattering like drum-beats, followed by a regular fusillade of 
platoons I then came the roaring of cannon. The citizens soon 
discovered that war in its full flower was at their very doors. 
General Mercer with his brigade, which on nearing the tjjwn. 



378 The Story of an Old Farm. 

tad been detached from the main column, came upon the British 
advance at Samuel Worth's mill, near where the King's highway 
crosses Stony brook, about one mile southwest of Princeton. He 
would have been overwhelmed, but Washington with the conti- 
nentals and militia promptly came to his support ; a sharp and 
decisive engagement followed ; in less than thirty minutes vic- 
tory perched upon the American banners, and the enemy, horse 
and foot, were in full retreat. 

I do not propose to weary the patience of my readers with an 
account of this famous, battle. Able historians have made us all 
familiar with the miraculous escape of Washington when exposed 
to a cross-fire of friend and foe ; have told over and over again 
of General Mercer's having been pinned to the earth by the 
fatal thrusts of British bayonets ; of how the smoke rose above 
the combatants and hung in air, a clear, white, cumulus cloud, as 
if weighted with the souls of those who had just closed their eyes 
on the radiance of that winter morn ; of the appearance pre- 
sented by the British commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Mawhood, 
who in the heat of the action rode at the head of his men on a 
little brown pony, with two springing spaniels playing before 
him ; of Knox's training his artillery on Nassau Hall to dislodge 
a portion of the 40th Regiment which had taken refuge in the 
college building ; and of the many other incidents crowded 
within the short space of time occupied in completely routing 
the British forces. Taking into consideration the number of 
troops engaged, no action dm-ing the war was so fatal to Ameri- 
-can officers. One general, one colonel, three captains, one lieu- 
tenant and an ensign were killed ; but then, as has been learned, 
oflicers were so numerous in this little army that even in so short 
an exposure to the enemy's fire that number of casualties was 
fairly to be expected. All told, the American loss was but 
thirty, while the British left one hundred dead on the field and 
nearly three hundred men in our hands as prisoners, including 
fourteen officers. Fifty of the captives were sent into Pennsyl- 
vania, the rest being brought along with the army. 

Among the enemy's fatally wounded was a young Scotchman, 
William Leslie, a son of the Earl of Leven and a captain in the 
17th Regiment of foot. He was of a military line, being a descend- 
ant of that old Earl of Leven who was a soldier under Gustavus, 



Captain Leslie's Death-Wound. 379 

and who at the battle of Marston Moor boldly rode at the head 
of his tough Scotch covenanters to oppose the cavalier troopers, 
massed by the thousands under the silken standard of Prince 
Rupert. It is a singular circumstance that when Captain Leslie 
received his death-wound, so far from home and kindred, the 
only two Americans knowing of him and his people were in the 
immediate vicinity, one being in the army against which he was 
contending. He fought his last battle almost within the shadows 
of the walls of a college whose president, John Witherspoon, 
was the lifelong friend of his parents. Before being called to 
America Doctor Witherspoon had been a prominent Presbyterian 
minister at Paisley, a Scottish town not far from Melville House, 
the seat of the Earl of Leven. Captain Leslie's mother, the 
countess, was a devout adherent to the kirk of Scotland, and had 
the interests of Presbyterianism much at heart. That she might 
keep informed as to its progress in America, for a number of 
years after her old friend had been called to the presidency of 
the college of New Jersey she continued with him a religious and 
friendly correspondence, and ever held him in high esteem. 

Strange as it may appear, when Leslie fell he almost at once 
received aid from another friend of his parents. Surgeon Benja- 
min Rush, before mentioned, had gained his medical education 
at the University of Edinburgh. While in Scotland he became 
acquainted with the family of the Earl of Leven. The young 
student's refined and polished manners, together with the 
peculiarly fascinating conversational powers with which he was 
endowed, made his frequent visits to Melville House always 
welcome. After his return to America he was ever held, espe- 
cially by the countess, in affectionate remembrance ; this feeling 
was heightened to a tender and grateful regard by the doctor's 
attention and services to her wounded son. When the heat of 
the engagement at Princeton was over, Washington and his staff 
while crossing some fallow ground discovered a party of soldiers 
supporting an injured officer. Upon enquiring and learning his 
name and rank, Surgeon Rush, who was in the general's suite, 
thus addressed his chief: "I beg your excellency to permit this 
wounded officer to be placed under my care, that I may return, 
in however small a degree, a part of the obligations I owe to his 
worthy father for the many kindnesses received at his hands 



380 The Story of ax Old Farm. 

while I was a student at Edinburgh." The request was, 
of course, granted ; Rush was quickly out of the saddle, and 
witli the aid of an orderly placed Leslie in a farmer's wagon 
that was collecting the wounded. The young soldier at once 
received surgical treatment, and every care and attention was 
bestowed on him until his death, which occurred during the 
following afternoon. 

The Americans had no cavalry to follow the fleeing enemy, 
and the foot soldiers were in anything but a condition for pursuit. 
After the fight Washington was sorely tempted to push on to 
New Brunswick in the hope of securing the British stores. It 
was impossible, owing to the condition of his men; for much of 
the past thirty-six hours they had been marching and fighting, 
many of them had had neither breakfast nor dinner, and tlie 
entire army were completely exhausted. He was thus forced to 
seek the hill country where his victorious troops could without 
molestation obtain the rest and refreshment they so much needed. 
Re-forming his column, the general pressed on along the King's 
highway to Van Tilburgh's inn, at Kingston, which stood, and 
until lately was still standing, on the north side of that thorough- 
fare. Here, turning to the left on the narrow Rocky Hill road, 
he marched his way-worn soldiers down the valley of the Mill- 
stone. 

The first information that Cornwallis had of the affair at 
Princeton was the booming of cannon on the break of that cold 
day which he had expected to devote to catching "the old fox." 
He was much chagrined at Washington's escape, but was soon 
in full pursuit, the rear-guard under General Leslie, which had 
rested at Maidenhead, being in the van. A stern chase is 
always a long one. Much time was lost in crossing Stony 
brook, the bridge having been destroyed. On nearing Prince- 
ton a cannon-shot from a small redoubt brought the British to a 
halt, their generals thinking that the Americans had fortified 
themselves in the town. This gun was fired by a few militia- 
men who had then hastily retired, but an hour was lost before 
Cornwallis discovered this, and was again on the march. Having 
great fears for his military chest and supplies at New Brunswick, 
he hurriedly passed on through Princeton and Kingston without 
learning that at the latter place his foes had filed to the left. 



Marching Down the Millstone. 381 

Meanwhile, let us follow Washington, who was for the first 
time penetrating Somerset county. An auspicious advent ! 
Arrayed in the continental blue and buff, as he sat his horse 
with all that martial dignity peculiar to himself, he came as a 
conqueror, welcomed by the enthusiastic greetings of the popu- 
lace. The little army toiled along the east bank of the Mill- 
stone, the men in high spirits over the experiences of the past 
twenty-four hours, but yet, so weak from cold, hunger and 
fatigue that they defiled along in dispersed order, with heavy 
steps, guns carried in whatever way was easiest, and their eyes 
almost glued with sleep. Many fell out by the way, and stretch- 
ing themselves on the frozen ground sought that repose which 
exhausted nature refused longer to await. But few of the men 
were decently clad, much less amply protected from the wintry 
air, while sad to relate some were without covering for their 
feet. It is told that Washington while riding by the side of his 
troops noticed that William Lyon, a continental soldier from 
Middlesex county, was without stockings, and almost, if not 
entirely, without shoes. As he trudged sturdily along, his bare 
and bloody feet left their marks on the ice and gravel of the 
roadway. The general, checking his horse, tapped Lyon gently 
on the shoulder and said : '^ My brave boy you deserve a better 
fate." " Ah," replied the plucky young soldier, " there is no 
danger of my feet freezing as long as the blood runs." This 
Revolutionary hero survived that hardship and many others, not 
dying till 1841. Rumbling along in the midst of the column 
were country carts containing that sad contingent of all victorious 
armies, the wounded — poor wretches who rested wearily against 
the sides of the wagon bodies, their countenances making mute 
appeals for human sympathy ; some with arms in slings, some 
with heads bandaged, some with limbs and jaws shattered, while 
others lying in the straw were pale and wan, with eyes fast 
glazing. 

Much of interest appertaining to this march to Morristown is 
to be learned from the manuscript diary of Captain Thomas 
Rodney of the Dover light-infantry, which is preserved by his 
descendants. This officer's company was embodied into a regi- 
ment with the four companies of the Philadelphia light-infantry, 
under the commandof the senior captain, George Henry. When 



382 The Story of an Old Farm. 

the van of the American army reached the bridge which then 
spanned tlie Millstone in front of the residence of Christopher 
Hoagland, near Griggstown, British cavalry appeared in consider- 
able force on the opposite bank. Just then the condition of Wash- 
ington's men was such that he desired neither to pursue nor to 
be pursued, so, riding forward, he ordered Rodney to halt and 
break up the bridge. The captain recites that on this being done 
the enemy were forced to retire ; this would lead one to suppose 
that the river's depth at that time was much greater than now, as 
the present volume of water would hardly prove a bar to the pas- 
sage of mounted men. Commissaries were sent forward to notify 
the inhabitants of the coming of the troops, and to direct that food 
be prepared for their refreshment. It is said that this demand 
met with a fair response, and when the army at dusk reached 
Somerset Court-house — Millstone — where it encamped for the 
night, a considerable number of rations were in readiness. 

Washington and some of his staff quartered at the residence 
of John Van Doren, just south of the village ; the house is still 
standing, as is the barn in which the general's horse was stabled. 
Mr. Van Doren's military guests were not always of so distin- 
guished a character. Some months later it was soldiers of the 
enemy that took possession of this old homestead. Upon their 
approach the men of the household thought it wase to disappear, 
but old Mrs. Van Doren pluckily stood her ground and deiied 
the intruders. She refused to give up her keys or tell where 
the family treasures were secreted, whereupon the brutal sol- 
diers, after ransacking the house, hung her up by the heels in 
the cellar. After their departure she was released by her neigh- 
bors, but not until black in the face, and almost lifeless. 

During the night many laggards came into camp, and in the 
morning the column was again pushing northAvard, crossing the 
Raritan at Van Veghten's bridge, near the present Finderne 
railway station. Here, as Rodney states, Washington was again 
tempted to march on New Brunswick, but realizing that his 
troops must have repose he finally abandoned the project. Mov- 
ing up the river, at Tunison's tavern — now Fritt's — the army 
filed to the right and continued over the hills to Pluckamin, 
which place was reached during the afternoon. The woimded 
were distributed in the houses of the village j the Lutheran 



A Great Day for Pluckamin. 383 

church as a temporary prison received the captured men, while 
in the Matthew Lane house — now owned by John Fenner, Jr. — 
it is said that the thirteen captured officers were placed under 
guard. Poor Leslie was no longer a prisoner, his soul having 
taken flight while the wagon, in which he and other wounded 
men were carried, was descending the hill below Chamber's 
brook, at the outskirts of the village. The troops encamped on 
the bleak hillside just south of Pluckamin, the top of which, as 
Rodney writes, was covered with snow. Torn with the shock 
of conflict, weak from need of nourishment, and enfeebled by 
cold and exhaustion, this place of security, together with the 
prospect of rest, was most grateful to the little army. Commis- 
saries had been busy ; within a few hours the camp was pretty 
well supplied with provisions, and before the drums beat tattoo 
nearly one thousand men, who had been unable to keep up on 
the march, rejoined their commands. When the darkness of 
night closed around Pluckamin mountain, the ruddy glow of 
camp fires shone among the trees near the foot of its northern 
slope. The flames, flashing up, illumined groups of soldiers, 
stacks of arms, and tethered horses ; near by^ baggage- wagons, 
caissons, and cannon were parked in military lines, while here 
and there the shadowy forms of sentinels could be distinguished. 
There is no such comfort as fullness and warmth after cold and 
hunger. It was not long before most of the tired men were full- 
length at the foot of the trees, forgetting the travail of a soldier's 
life in needful sleep. 

Sunday the fifth of January was a great day for Pluckamin. 
The news of Washington being in Bedminster had rapidly 
spread, and while it was yet early, on the roads and lanes lead- 
ing to the village numerous parties of country people could be 
seen, all hurrying to visit the soldiers and learn for themselves 
the latest news of the campaign. Throughout the entire day the 
place was astir with an animated multitude, and excitements of 
all kinds ruled the hour. Squads of infantry and artillerjanen 
were everywhere. Farmers' wagons laden with provisions came 
rolling in from the neighborhood of Peapack, Lamington and the 
valley. Stern, brown-visaged officers, in heavy boots and tar- 
nished uniforms, were mounting here, dismounting there, and 
clattering through the streets in every direction. Foraging 



384 The Story of an Old Farm. 

parties were being dispatched ; couriers and express messengers 
rode off in hot haste ; horses neighed, men shouted, and on all 
sides were hand-shakings and congratulations. The martial 
instinct of the people seemed alert ; eyes sparkled and all hearts 
beat quickly. Every little while brought new arrivals of coun- 
try people, and the details of the famous victory must be gone 
over again and again. Although the war was yet young the 
soldiers had plenty to tell of marches and counter-marches, of 
camp life and bivouacs, of attacks, routs, wounds and hard- 
ships. And then the new-comers were carried off to the 
Lutheran church, which was surrounded by a cordon of sentinels. 
And through its doors and windows, what a brave show ! — two 
hundred and thirty British soldiers ; broad-shouldered, big- 
boned Scotchmen, stalwart grenadiers, and dragoons brilliant 
with color — caged lions, who looked with gloomy stares upon 
the inquisitive and rejoicing Americans, whom the experiences 
of the past few days had taught them to better appreciate as 
soldiers and freemen. 

And so the day wore on ! Everywhere were motion and con- 
fusion. Eoifs tavern kept open table, and on its porch conti- 
nental and militia officers of all grades mingled. It was cling- 
clany ! cling-clang ! all that Sunday on the anvil of the village 
forge, for from sunrise to the gloaming honest John Wortman 
and his brawny assistants were busy with hammer, sledge, and 
tongs, shoeing army horses and repairing army wagons. "Cap- 
tain Bullion," too — John Boylan, Pluckamin's first storekeeper — 
was robbed of his usual Sunday quiet, being obliged to expose 
his wares for the benefit of impatient soldiers and visitors. Sur- 
geons hurried from house to house, drums beat for guard-mount, 
subalterns marched reliefs to the different sentry-posts, and the 
din of war was in the very air. Amid the bustle and animation, 
in fancy, I can see Aaron Malick, clad in his Sunday breeches 
of blue cloth, his red waistcoat with flapping pockets showing 
from under an amply skirted coat adorned with metal buttons. 
He had come down from the "Old Stone House" with the hope 
of learning something of his boy John, but that poor lad was 
still in the grip of Provost Cuningham, and knew nothing of the 
happy close of a campaign which had commenced for him rather 
ingloriously. In after years Aaron often told of the aspect Plucka- 



The Burial of Captain Leslie. 385 

rain presented on those memorable days when it was occupied by 
the heroes of Trenton and Princeton. He especially delighted in 
reminiscences of the generals whose names grew greater as the 
war progressed — of Greene, tall and vigorous, with the air of 
one born to command ; of Sullivan, alert and soldierly ; of Knox, 
whose broad, full face beamed with satisfaction ; but, above all, of 
the conspicuous figure of Washington, who seemed a king among 
men as he moved amid the throng, with high-born eye, lofty but 
courteous port, and a calm, strong face reflecting a mind full of 
the tranquillity of conscious power. Tradition mentions the 
Fenner house, before referred to as still standing, as having been 
the headquarters of the commander-in-chief. He spent much of 
the early part of this Sunday in preparing his report of the battle 
of Princeton, and of the movements of the army since crossing 
the Delaware. Upon the completion of the dispatch. Captain 
Henry was detailed to carry it at once to congress at Philadel- 
phia ; this left Captain Rodney, as next senior in rank, in com- 
mand of the light-infantry regiment. 

Visitors to Pluckamin on that eventful Sunday were treated to 
an unexpected affair of ceremony. About midday a detachment 
of forty men from Rodney's regiment marched into the village, 
and drew up in line with its centre opposite the entrance to the 
building in which lay the dead body of Captain Leslie — proba- 
bly Eoff's tavern. The young British officer was about to be 
buried with the honors of war, the light-infantry being selected 
as escort because of their soldierly appearance and superior uni- 
form. The detachment was commanded by Captain Humphries, 
it having been turned over to him by Rodney, who had not con- 
sidered himself sufficiently familiar with the details of a burial 
ceremony. At the beat of muffled drum and wail of fife the 
men presented arms, as the corpse was borne from the house to 
the flank of the line. The escort then broke into column of 
fours, and, reversing arms, marched in slow time and with 
solemn step to the Lutheran churchyard, where they filed to the 
left, forming in line opposite an open grave which had been dug 
near the head of that of Johannes Moelich. 

There were wet eyes and true grief at that sepulchre, for 
Doctor Rush was not the only mourner present. Among the 
citizens and military clustering about the bier were the captured 
25 



386 The Story of an Old Farm. 

British officers, whom Washington had generously permitted to 
be present in order that they might bid a final adieu to a com- 
rade in arms who had been much beloved. And then the solemn 
hush was broken by the deep voice of the chaplain, saying, " I 
am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord." As the 
simple service continued, the body of the young warrior slowly 
descended to its gravelly bed, the troops, meanwhile, resting their 
bent heads on the butts of their muskets, the muzzles being 
pressed to the groimd. When the icy clods fell on the rude cof- 
fin the escort fired three volleys over the open grave, and then, 
shouldering arms, marched away, the drums and fifes striking up 
a lively tune on reaching the highway. The prisoners were 
I'eturned to their quarters, the crowd dispersed and again contri- 
buted to the village tumults, leaving Leslie to sleep in his remote 
and retired tomb until its deep silence shall be broken by a maj- 
estic reveille, ushering in that eternal day which shall proclaim 
the full brotherhood of man, and in which such distinctions as 
friend and foe shall be no more, forever. 

Captain Rodney tells us that these high military honors were 
accorded because of the desire of the American army to pay 
" due respect to bravery, tho' in an enemy." Leslie's gallantry 
in action at Princeton had won the admiration of his opponents ; 
indeed, this may be said as of the entire 17th British regiment. In 
the height of the engagement, Washington, on witnessing the cour- 
age and discipline of this command, could not forbear exclaiming 
to his officers, " See how those noble fellows fight ! Ah! gentle- 
men, when shall we be able to keep an army long enough 
together to display a discipline equal to our enemy's ?" The 
attention of Surgeon Benjamin Rush to the son of his friends in 
Scotland did not end with the funeral. He marked the grave 
with a brown headstone inscribed : — 

In memory of the Hon. Captain William Leslie of the 17th British Regiment, 
son of the Earl of Leven in ycotland. He fell January 3(1, 1777, aged 26 years, 
at the battle of Princeton. His friend Benjamin Rush M.D. of Philadelphia, 
caused this stone to be erected as a mark of his esteem for his worth, and respect 
for his noble family. 

This headstone stood for nearly sixty years before it suc- 
cumbed to the gnawing tooth of time. About the year 1835 
Professor John D. Ogilby of Rutgers college, when in Scotland, 



Doctor Benjamin Rush. 387 

was requested by the then Earl of Leven to find and, if neces- 
sary, re-mark the grave. Upon the professor's return to America 
he applied to the writer's father for information as to where the 
ofiicer was buried. Together they visited Pluckamin and had 
the present stone set up, reproducing the original inscription. 

This soldier's grave is a connecting link between our quiet 
Somerset village and the busy life of one of the most gifted 
Americans of the last century. When Doctor Rush died at the 
age of sixty-eight, few men in the United States were better 
known, were held in higher esteem for genius and learning, or 
were more sincerely beloved for philanthropy and good works. 
When at Pluckamin with Washington's army he was thirty-one 
years old, his Princeton degree having been gained at the early 
age of fifteen. In person he was above middle stature, with a 
slender but well-proportioned figure. His combined features 
bespoke a strong and an active intellect, and though his whole 
demeanor was thoughful and grave, expressive blue eyes 
illumined a highly animated countenance. Doctor Rush was a 
man of wide and varied knowledge, with a talent for imparting 
it to others that was singularly felicitous. It is claimed that no 
one long remained in his presence without feeling conscious of 
an intellectual refreshment ; and a contemporaneous writer has 
recorded that "his conversation was an attic repast, which, far 
from cloying, invigorated the appetite of those who partook of 
it." This distinguished surgeon must have left Pluckamin 
immediately after the burial of Captain Leslie, as on the follow- 
ing day he dated a letter from Bordentown, and on the same 
afternoon was summoned and went to Princeton to attend upon 
the dying General Mercer. Before the end of the month he had 
taken his seat in congress, which was then sitting at Baltimore. 
His figure soon became a familiar one to Somerset people, as in 
April he received the appointment of surgeon-general of the 
hospital in the middle department, and in July was made physi- 
cian-general of the army. 

Another interesting incident connected with the stay of the 
army at this time in Pluckamin, was the arrival in camp of the 
gallant Captain John Stryker's troop of Somerset horse, laden 
with spoils from the enemy. CornwaUis in his hurried march 
toward New Brunswick was so unfortunate as to disable a num- 



388 The Stouy of an Old Farm. 

ber of his banjgage-wagons. He left them at the side of the 
road in charge of a quartermaster with a guard of two hundred 
men. Claptain Stryker, though having with him but twenty- 
troopers, resolved u])on the capture of these stores. In the dark- 
ness of night lie distributed his small force in a circle, completely 
surrounding the camp. The guard were suddenly astounded by 
a volley of musket-shots and the whistling of bullets, while from 
under the black arches of the bordering trees came loud and 
repeated shouts, as if from a countless host. Demoralized by 
recent defeats the men incontinently fled, thinking that they had 
been attacked by a large force of the Americans. Their fright 
was not so much caused by the roar of musketry as by the 
imoarthly veils of the lusty troopers which so suddenly broke the 
stillness of the night. Captain Stryker was not long in so repair- 
ing the wagons that they coiJd be hauled to a place of safety ; 
he lost no time in making his way to Washington's camp with 
his treasures. The joy of the troops was unbounded when it was 
discovered that the wagons contained woollen clothing, of which 
the men stood in sore need. 

Early on the morning of the sixth of January, Pluckamin lost, 
as suddenly as it had gained, the distinction of being the head- 
quarters of Washington's army. Soon after sounding reveille 
the drums beat assembly, and the men were under arms. The 
different commands tiled out of camp, and forming into column 
passed through the village, taking up their line of march north- 
ward. Our oft-quoted diarist has given us the formation. A 
small advance-guard led the way, followed by the humbled Eng- 
lish officers ; then came the light-infantry regiment, swinging 
along in column of fours ; next, the prisoners, marching in a 
long thin line and flanked by Colonel Edward Hand's Pennsyl- 
vania riflemen. This young officer — he was then thirty-two — 
always presented a tine military appearance, as he had a splen- 
did tigure and was considered one of the best horsemen in the 
army. He was an Irish surgeon who had settled in Pennsyl- 
vania in 1774. At the outset of the Revolution, abandoning his 
profession, he offered his services to the country. He served 
with credit during the war, attaining the rank of brigadier-gen- 
eral, and in later years was a member of congress and tilled 
other honorable civic positions. After the riflemen rode 



Washington Marches Through Bernards. 389 

the doughty and intrepid Knox, sitting squarely on his horse, 
and followed by his artillery brigade as the van of the main 
column. Distributed alongside the extended line were the 
mounted general and staff officers. 

Rested and refreshed, it was probably the most peaceful and 
satisfactory march experienced by the continental array since 
leaving Hackensack, three months before, with Comwallis at their 
heels. We may presume that precautions to guard against 
surprise were not considered necessary ; it is not probable that 
squads of men were thrown out on the flanks, or that scouts and 
skirmishers ranged far in advance. Secure from pursuit, the 
little army in good heart trailed slowly along the narrow road, 
breaking in upon the country quiet with rattle of scabbard and 
snort of charger, with champ of bit and jingle of harness, with 
rumble of baggage and gun wagons, and the crunch on the frozen 
ground of thousands of marching feet. On reaching Peter 
Melick's farm at the ^' Cross Roads," the advance turned to the 
right. Passing over the north branch of the Raritan river the 
army climbed the Bernards hills, awakening the echoes of their 
shaggy woods with the unaccustomed sound of drum and bugle. 
With frequent halts the column moved on through Vealtown 
(Bernardsville) and New Vernon, until just before sunset it 
reached Morristown, where we, after having piloted Washington 
and his men in safety through Somerset county, may leave them 
to go into winter quarters. 




CHAPTER XXVII. 

Washington's Army at Morristown in the Winter and Spring 
of 1777— The ^' Old Farm" on a Military Thoroughfare. 

In ringing up the curtain on the next act of our local drama, a 
scene is disclosed very different from any heretofore shown on 
these Bedminster boards. In life, as on the mimic stage, start- 
ling and unexpected changes are not only always in order but 
frequently come as imannomiced surprises. And so it is with 
the era we have reached in telling the story of the " Old Farm." 
Its familiar environment of country quiet is transformed — its 
accessories are all of a different pattern. In the place of the fir 
tree and the myrtle have come the thorn and the bramble ; 
ploughshares and pruning-hooks have literally been beaten into 
swords and spears. Though war and rumors of war had now 
long been rife, its alarms and incidents had not been a portion 
of the daily life of this agricultural community. 

When Breeds' Hill trembled under its cannonade Bedminster 
repose was not disturbed, and when the battle of Long Island 
raged, the family in the ^' Old Stone House " was affected 
thereby only as it touched its members personally in their love 
of country, or in their anxiety for those engaged in the conflict. 
Even when the tide of combat, crossing the Hudson, rolled over 
the level plains of the Jerseys, and the American army, sullen 
and dispirited, fell back to the Delaware before an exultant 
enemy, Bedminster was too far distant to have the spell of war 
overturn its usual routine of existence. At times during the 
month of the year just gone its rural calm had been broken by 
military turmoil, as, for instance, when Sullivan came marching 
through with Lee's division. But.such occasions had not been 



Washington at the Old Stone House. 391 

many, nor for long, and the homesteads, fields, and folds had 
quickly relapsed to their accustomed quiet. Now, however, all 
this was to be changed, and the beat of drvim and blare of trum- 
pet were to become familiar sounds. The '^ Old Farm " 
bordered a militarv thoroughfare, for in establishing the Ameri- 
can camp at Morristown for the winter other cantonments had 
been located in the south, east and west. There was constant 
going and coming between the different posts, and the highways 
and byways were alive with soldiers. Farmer-lads on their way 
to mill with sacks of com athwart their horses' backs, rode cheek 
by jowl with spurred and booted troopers, and listened with 
open-eyed wonder to their warlike tales. The rattle of farm- 
wagons was supplemented by the heavy roU of artillery trains, 
and squads of infantry were met at every hand. 

At this time many a continental officer whose name now 
ornaments the pages of history dismounted at the ^' Old Stone 
House" for rest and refreshment, or for a draught from the deep 
well of its flanking dooryard, whose waters then as now had 
great repute, the wide country 'round. This dwelling lays no 
claim to the possession of a bed upon which Washington has 
slept ; exhibits no chair upon which he has sat ; or table at 
which he has dined ; but it is fair to presume that more than 
once its walls have reflected that august presence. As at that 
time this house ranked among the most important of the town- 
ship it is not probable that the commander-in-chief could always 
have passed it by. His papers and correspondence show him to 
have been that winter constantly on the road, visiting the difter- 
ent outposts and making the acquaintance of the country and 
people. We shall, therefore, not be charged with trespassing 
beyond the boundary line of possibility, when, in fancy, we see 
him giving a dignity and grandeur to the homely interior of the 
old house, as he stands, erect, serene, majestic, before the great 
fireplace in the living-room. He is questioning Aaron, perhaps, 
as to the character of some of the inhabitants thereabouts, or 
receiving at the hands of Charlotte a hospitable mug of cider or 
a cup of cream ; while the family and friends look with love and 
respect upon the illustrious man who has retrieved the honor of 
the country, and won the approbation and esteem of every grate- 
ful American. 



392 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Washington had great fondness for horses. Having from boy- 
hood been at home in the saddle he presented when mounted a 
singularly graceful appearance. During the winter and spring 
of which we are now writing he was frequently seen trotting 
along the Bedminster highways, accompanied by members of 
his staff and a small guard. A chronicler thus describes his 
impressions, received a few years afterwards, on unexpectedly 
coming upon the general riding over the Somerset hills : — 

As I walked on, ascending a liill suddenly appeared a brilliant troop of 
cavaliers. The clear sky behind them equally relieved the dark blue uniforms, 
the bull' facings and glittering military appendages. All were gallantly mounted 
— all were tall and graceful, but one towered above the rest. I doubted not an 
instant that I saw the beloved hero. * * * Although all my life used 
to the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war, to gay and gallant 
Englishmen, the tartaned Scot, and the embroidered German of every mili- 
tary grade, I still think the old blue and buff of Washington and his aids, their 
cocked-hats worn sidelong, with the union cockade, their whole equipment, as 
seen at that moment, was the most martial of anything that I ever saw. 

And we may readily believe that the inhabitants looked with 
delight on these chance meetings with the commander-in-chief. 
Since the affairs of Trenton and Princeton his praises were in 
everyone's mouth and he was fully believed to have established a 
reputation for generalship unequalled in that age. As the years 
have gone by, this verdict has stood the test of time — not with 
Americans only, but with the Avorld at large. Von Bulow the 
German, Botta the Italian, Walpole the Englishman, Guizot, 
the Frenchman, have all aided in building for him a temple of 
immortality. 

We may suppose that Aaron journeyed frequently to Morris- 
town during the winter ; visitors were made very welcome at the 
American camp, especially if they brought supplies. Farmers 
soon found that they had an excellent market near at home, and 
that commissaries were eager to pay fifteen cents for beef, forty- 
five cents for butter, and eight shillings for geese and turkeys. 
The main part of the army lay in the Lowantica, or Spring, 
valley, which stretches from Morristown toward Green Village. 
The camp was laid out on what have since been known as the 
Treadwell and Muchmore farms. The main street of this mili- 
tary village, which was about eighty feet wide and bordered 
with large officers' tents, occupied the slope just west of the 



The Country Jubilant. 393 

dwelling of the late A. M. Treadwell. It was well graded and 
used as a parade-ground, a large libertj-tree being planted in 
its centre. On parallel streets, about forty feet wide, were the 
soldiers' huts built in blocks of four or five together, and, in 
addition, there were log store-houses and large cabins for the use 
of sutlers and commissaries. Both officers and men were in 
splendid spirits, and the sentiments of all had undergone a mar- 
vellous change, an almost jubilant confidence having taken the 
place of the despondency of the close of the year. As Washing- 
ton wrote to Governor Cook, on the twentieth of January: — 

Our afifairs here are in a very prosperous train. Within a month past, in 
several engagements with the enemy, we liave killed, wounded, and taken pris- 
oners beween two and three thousand men. 

A week later he wrote in the same strain : — 

Our affairs at present are in a prosperous way. The country seems to enter- 
tain an idea of our snperiority. Recruiting goes on well, and a belief prevails 
that the enemy are afraid of us. 

It was even so ! The pendulum of public opinion had 
swung to the other extremity of its arc. The people expected 
that the American army, small in numbers, poorly clad, badly 
fed, and with but little training, would prevail against Howe's 
well-appointed force of veteran soldiers. Strange as it may 
appear, this expectation was not altogether without realization. 
That at times the Americans did successfully cope with the 
enemy, and that, though often sufi'ering privations hitherto almost 
unknown in the annals of warfare, they continued to harass the foe, 
and ultimately triumphed, can largely be charged to the fact of 
superior generalship. In addition, the extent and variety of the 
country, with its inimical population and alert militia, made a 
British success barren of results. There always remained an 
army — though a ragged one — in the field. It was not like 
European fighting where often one great action woidd be decisive 
and end the war. As General Greene wrote at this time : — 

We cannot conquer the British force at once, but they cannot conquer us at all. 
The limits of the British government in America are their out-sentinels. 

Tolstoi claims that the real problem of the science of war is to 
ascertain and formulate the value of the spirit of the men, and 
their willingness and eagerness to fight. The Russian author is 



394 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

right. Could this always be done it would often be found that 
large armies, thorough equipment, and perfection of discipline do 
not always carry with them assurances of successful campaigns. 
Greater than these, greater than the genius of generals, is that 
element of personal spirit pervading the contending forces. Our 
own Revolutionary struggle is an excellent exemplification of 
this fact. The English soldiers had but little enthusiasm for the 
work they were called upon to do, — the subsidiary troops, none 
at all. The Americans, on the contrary, animated by a spirit 
that had the force of a religion, were ever ready and willing to 
meet the enemy — ever ready to dog their heels, harass their 
flanks, and fall upon their outposts. For liberty and their native 
land they were ever eager to fight in battalions or in small 
parties, as guerillas or as individuals. British soldiers, however 
well disciplined, were no match for American citizens who were 
fighting to avenge burned homes, ravaged families, and an 
invaded soil. 

Washington's headquarters in Morristown were at a tavern, 
which, together with the old court-house with its wooden cupola 
and shingled sides, faced the village-green, now an open com- 
mon. This tavern was kept by Jacob Arnold, Avho was well 
knoAvn as the commander of a troop of Morris light-horse. It 
occupied the present site of Marsh and Hoffman's large brick 
building. The original structui'e was removed in 1886 to Kim- 
ball avenue, where reconstructed and modernized it is still to be 
seen. At the outset of the war Morristown had but about two 
hundred and fifty inhabitants, and the most of its property was 
owned by the Johnes, Hathaway, Doughty, .Ford and Condict 
families. Its two church edifices, Presbyterian and Baptist, on 
the arrival of the American army, were converted into hospitals, 
in which use they continued for about eighteen months. The 
Presbyterian congregation was forced to worship, even in the 
cold weather, in the open air, assembling in an orchard in the 
rear of the old parsonage on Morris street. It was in this his- 
toric grove that Washington partook of communion, after being 
assured by parson Johnes that " Ours is not the Presbyterian 
table but the Lord's table, and we hence give the Lord's invita- 
tion to all his followers of whatever name." 

The commander-in-chief appointed the light-infantry to be his 



MouRiSTOWN Camp in 1777. 395 

personal g-uard, requiring twenty-six men to mount sentry around 
the Arnold tavern. That this guard might always be within a more 
convenient distance than was the general camp, the entire regi- 
ment was installed about one mile away, in the large Ford man- 
sion, now the well-known " Headquarters." General Greene quar- 
tered with a Mr. Hoffman, whom tradition mentions as a good- 
natured man, whose charming wife was a great lover of the clergy. 
It is said that Mrs. Hoffman was often perplexed with doubts and 
difficulties on religious questions raised by the general's aides, 
especially by the merry, restless, witty Major Blodget. Early 
in January Mrs. Washington, Mrs. Knox and other ladies joined 
their husbands in camp ; after that, the officers of the army knew 
many comforts and not a few pleasures. Visits were exchanged 
between hospitable, blazing hearthstones, merry sleighrides were 
enjoyed over the snow-covered Morris and Somerset hills, there 
were dinners at the different generals' quarters, little dances 
were frequent, and occasionally a subscription, ball — or assem- 
bly, as it was termed — was given. The latter affairs put 
the rural as well as the army society agog, invitations being 
extended in the neighborhood. These more important dances 
were held in a large room over the commissary's store-house, 
whicli faced the square, and which after the war was converted 
into the Morris Hotel. 

There were occasions of sorrow in camp as well as of gladness. 
A few days after the army reached Morristown, Colonel Daniel 
Hitchcock of Rhode Island, who had fought and marched under 
Washington from the outset, fell a victim to the fatigues and 
exposures of the campaign. This officer was a graduate of Yale 
college, aiid few gentlemen in the army excelled him in talents 
and ability. At Assunpink and Princeton he commanded a 
brigade of five regiments, and after the latter action Washing- 
ton warmly pressed the colonel's hand, while expressing his 
approbation of his conduct and of the behavior of his command. 
On the eleventh of January Colonel Jacob Ford, Jr. of Morris- 
town, who had commanded a regiment of New Jersey '^ State 
Troops," died of lung fever, the result of a severe cold con- 
tracted in the service. His command had been with the Ameri- 
can army in the retreat from the Hudson. On reaching New 
Brunswick Washinaton detached (^reneral Williamson with the 



396 The Story of an Old Farm. 

militia battalions of Colonels Thomas of Essex, Symmes of Sus- 
sex, and Ford of Morris, ordering them in the direction of the 
Short Hills and Morristown, to cover that portion of the country 
and to prevent, as far as possible, marauding bands of the enemy 
from harassing and plundering the inhabitants. Soon after this, 
Greneral Williamson and Colonel Thomas retired from the army, 
whereupon on the twentieth of December Maxwell was dis- 
patched to Morristown to take command of the troops there. 
His orders directed him to harass the enemy, supply the com- 
mander-in-chief with information, and to do what he could to 
prevent the people from seeking British protection. His force 
was composed of the Sussex, Essex and Morris battalions, and the 
regiments of Colonels Greaton, Bond and Porter, (about five 
hundred men), which, while marching through New Jersey under 
Gates, had been halted at Morristown. On the thirty-lirst of 
December Colonel Ford, while parading under Maxwell at the 
head of his command, was attacked by a sudden illness. He was 
borne off by two soldiers and put to bed, from which he never 
arose. Colonels Hitchcock and Ford expired much lamented ; 
they were buried with military honors. Captain Rodney's light- 
infantry company acting as escort, for the same reason as had 
caused its selection for the funeral of Captain Leslie at Plucka- 
min. Jacob Ford, Sr., the father of the colonel, also died on the 
nineteenth of the same month. 

General and Mrs. Washington were much attached to each 
other, and, so far as was possible, avoided long separations. 
Greene, in writing at this time to his wife, says : — 

Mrs. Wasliington and Mrs. Bland, from Virginin, are at camp, liappy with their 
better halves. Mrs. Washington is extremely fond of the general, and lie of her; 
they are happy in each other. 

It was the custom of the commander-in-chief to despatch an 
aide-de-camp each winter to escort his wife to headquarters. 
Her arrival was a noted event, and her plain chariot, with neat 
postilions in scarlet and white liveries, was always welcomed with 
great joy by the army. After the war Mrs. Washington used 
to say that she nearly always had heard the first and last cannon- 
firing of each campaign. Mrs. EUet, in her " Domestic History 
of the Revolution," states that on this, Mrs. Washington's first 
visit to New Jersey, she was met by her husband some distance 



Mrs. Washington at Morhistown Camp. 397 

from camp, probably at Pluckamin, he having come from Mor- 
ristown for that purpose The lady at whose house the general 
awaited the arrival of his wife was much astonished, when the 
carriage stopped, at seeing a so plainly dressed woman descend. 
She at first thought her to be a servant, but the idea was soon 
dispelled by seeing Washington hasten to aid her in alighting, 
and by noticing the tenderness of his greeting. After satisfying 
himself as to her health and the comforts of the journey, his first 
inquiries were for the favorite horses he had left at Mount 
Vernon. 

This was a time for ladies of monumental head-gear and exceed- 
ingly elaborate toilets ; but Mrs. Washington was very quiet in 
her tastes, and except on occasions of ceremony, always dressed 
with much plainness. In many respects the first lady of the 
land afibrded an excellent example to the women of America. 
Lossing depicts her at home as looking after every detail of the 
household, going about with a bunch of housekeeper's keys 
depending from her waist, and personally directing her many 
servants. While at Morristown, one day a number of the ladies 
of the village called npon her. Considering the occasion one of 
great importance and wishing to create a favorable impression, 
they arrayed themselves in their best gowns. One of the ladies, 
in her old age, gave the Reverend Doctor Joseph F. Tuttle, Mor- 
ristown's historian, the following account of their visit : — 

We were dressed in our most elegant silks and ruffles and so were introduced 
to her ladyship. And don't you think we found her with a speckled homespun 
apron on, and engaged in knitting a stocking ! She received us very handsomely 
and then resumed her knitting. In the course of her conversation she said very 
kindly to us, while she made her needle fly, that American ladies should be pat- 
terns of industry to their country women. * * * "We must become indepen- 
dent of England by doing without those articles which we can make ourselves. 
Whilst our husbands and brothers are examples of patriotism we must be exam- 
ples of industry ! 

" I declare," said one of the visiting ladies afterwards, '' I 
never felt so rebuked and ashamed in all my life." Mrs. Wash- 
ington used to entertain Mrs. Neilson, Mrs. Wilson, and other 
intimates of Morristown camp society with accounts of her home- 
life, and how there were always sixteen spinning-wheels going. 
She showed the ladies two morning dresses which had been made 
in her own house from ravellings of an old set of satin chair 



398 The Story of an Old Farm. 

covers. This material was carded, spun, and woven with cotton 
yarns, in alternate stripes of white cotton and crimson silk. 

Mrs. Neilson was the wife of Colonel John Neilson of the Mid- 
dlesex militia, one of the most active of New Jersey's sons of the 
Revolution. At the advent of the British he was driven from 
New Brimswick, his Burnet street residence being seized for 
the headquarters of General Howe. While her husband was 
serving with his regiment Mrs. Neilson spent the winter at Mor- 
ristown ; so highly was she considered at headquarters that she 
was always given a seat at the dinner-table nexj to that of Mrs. 
Washington. Mrs. Wilson was a yoimg and beautiful woman, 
the wife of Captain Robert Wilson of the New Jersey line who 
was wounded at Germantown, and who died at the early age of 
twenty-eight. Her father, Charles Stewart, of Landsdowne, near 
Clinton in Hunterdon county, was on Washington's staflf. He 
had commanded the 1st Regiment of New Jersey minute-men, 
and in 1776 entered the family of the commander-in-chief as 
commissary-general of issues, which position he retained through- 
out the war. General Washington and his wife were warmly 
attached to General Stewart, and were often his guests at his 
spacious mansion at Landsdowne, on the banks of the south 
branch of the Raritan river. 

Life has many sides. Mrs. Washington must have appre- 
ciated this to the full, in the strong contrasts presented by her 
alternate experiences of quiet home life at Mount Vernon, with 
its comforts and luxuries, and of the excitements, discomforts and 
dangers incidental to camp life each winter. She, however, 
always gladly braved the latter in order to enjoy her husband's 
society, and that she might aid him by counsel and consultation 
in the care of his distant estate. In the accounts which Wash- 
ington presented to the United States in July, 1783, and which 
comprehended his expenditures for eight years, the following 
entry appears : — 

To Mrs. Washington's travelling expenses in coming to and returning from my 
winter (juarters for act. rendered. The money to defray which being taken from 
my private purse, and brot with her from Virginia. £1064.10. 

The general doubted at first the propriety of making what 
appeared on its face to be a charge of a private nature ; but 
after consideration he decided that the claim was a just one, inas- 



American Successes Early in 1777, ,390 

much as the exigency of public affairs had prevented his making 
an annual visit to Mount Vernon, which self-denial resulted in 
much personal loss. It is almost unnecessary to say that in con- 
gress no voice was raised against the payment of this item. 

The buoyancy of feeling pervading the community was much 
enhanced during the month of January by a series of military 
successes. Mention has already been made of Captain Stryker's 
troopers having captured valuable stores, after putting to flight 
a force of the enemy ten times their number. On the seventh of 
the month General Maxwell, with a considerable body of conti- 
nentals and militia, fell suddenly upon Elizabethtown, capturing- 
fifty Waldeckers and forty Highlanders, and making a prize of a 
schooner loaded with baggage and blankets. About the same 
time a detachment surprised Spanktown — Rahway — driving out 
the enemy and securing a thousand bushels of salt. On the 
twentieth of January a foraging party of the enemy came out 
from New Brunswick to obtain flour from the mills on the Mill- 
stone. They were attacked with great spirit at what is known 
as Weston bridge by four hundred Jersey militia and fifty Penn- 
sylvania riflemen, who completely routed the enemy, killing and 
wounding a number, making nine prisoners, and securing forty 
wagons and nearly one hundred English draught-horses. The 
attacking party was led by General Philemon Dickinson, a zeal- 
ous officer who commanded all the New Jersey militia, and who 
during the war won for himself much renown. 

These many satisfactory enterprises, coming so soon after the 
affairs of Trenton and Princeton, still further increased public 
confidence. Washington deemed it expedient to take advantage 
of this prevailing sentiment by endeavoring to counteract the 
effect of the Howes's exemption proclamation. He consequently 
issued a counter one, directing all persons who held British pro- 
tection papers to deliver them at headquarters or some other 
d[esignated point, and there take the oath of allegiance to the 
United States. Thirty days from the twenty-fifth of January 
were allowed in which to do this, and those failing to comply 
within that period were required to withdraw themselves and 
their families within the British lines. Probably it was at this 
time that Peter Melick experienced his second change of heart 
toward the American cause, for he certainly remained in New 



400 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Jersey, and we hear nothing more of his disaffection. With 
detachments of the American army lying on his north, south and 
east, and with squads of continental soldiers passing and repass- 
ing almost daily on their way to and from the various posts, 
Peter could not have highly valued his British protection papers, 
and doubtless was glad enough to recover the good opinion of 
his neighbors by again ranging himself on the side of those who 
supported the government. The result of this order was much 
as Washington had anticipated. Some citizens in the vicinity of 
Elizabethtown, New Brunswick and Perth Amboy, unable to 
resist the dominating influence of the proximity of the English 
army, adhered to their belief in the uselessness of continuing the 
contest, and, therefore, were forced to abandon their homes. 
But the majority of the inhabitants, now feeling secui'e in the 
protection aiforded by American arms, were very ready to disa- 
vow their recent submission to the emissaries of the CroAvn. This 
was particularly the case in Somerset and Morris, and for the 
rest of the war tories were few and silent in those counties. 

All this time the British were quiet within their lines, and 
seemed content to await warmer weather before undertaking 
further operations. This gave to the Americans a much-needed 
opportunity for recuperation and for recruiting a new army, the 
terms of the enlistments for the old one, which had been fo\' a 
single year, having expired. Meanwhile it was necessary that a 
close watch should be kept upon Howe's force lest he should 
steal unawares in the direction of Philadelphia, or of Burgoyne's 
northern army. For this purpose different cantonments were 
established extending from the Highlands on the north, under 
Heath, to Princeton on the south, mider Putnam. This last 
general's command of about six hundi'ed men served as a corps 
of observation. Dui'ing the winter and spring the graceful figure 
of Putnam's chief aide was often seen galloping aci'oss the 
country ; and more than one Somerset maiden learned to look 
with fluttering heart and mantling color for a passing smile from 
the dangerously handsome Major Aaron Burr. If Dame Rumor 
wags a truthful tongue, this young staft' officer was not always 
content with paying a passing tribute to rural beauty. What- 
ever ambitions, worthy or otherwise, may have attacked this 
extraordinary man in civil life, they do not seem to have 



General Greene at Basking Ridge. 401 

affected his military career. The major wrote to a friend from 
Princeton on the seventh of March that he was well contented, 
neither expecting nor desiring promotion, and, as he expressed 
it, '' 1 am at present quite happy in the esteem and entire con- 
fidence of my good old general." During the few months that 
Putnam was stationed at this point he was very active in scouring 
the country, and he took from the enemy nearly one thousand 
prisoners and about one hundred and twenty wagon-loads of bag- 
gage and other booty. Sullivan's command lay in the vicinity 
of Scotch Plains, from which place he constantly sent out scouts 
to watch and report on the movements of the foe, and Dickinson, 
with the Jersey militia, did the same service in the vicinity of 
Somerset Court-bouse — now Millstone. General Lincohi, with 
a considerable force, guarded the Raritan ford at Bound 
Brook. A block-house or fortification was erected near the 
mouth of Bound Brook creek, on ground now occupied by the 
station of the Lehigh Valley railroad ; an earth-work connected 
it with the river. Lincoln quartered with Peter Williams at the 
east end of the village, whose dwelling was the most pretentious 
in the place, and the only one that could boast of two storeys. It 
stood where now is the lower crossing flag-station of the Central 
railroad. 

To be within easy support of these various posts, in February 
Greene's division moved down to Basking Ridge, where it 
remained until the opening of the next campaign. " Great 
men," says the hero worshipper, Carlyle, " taken up in any way 
are profitable company." If General Nathanael Greene was not 
great he at least did great things, and not the least, by any means, 
of his achievements was his having so educated himself as to rise 
in a few years from a very ordinary social plane to be the friend 
and companion of Washington, and from a private in a Rhode 
Island company to the rank of major-general in the American 
army. The personality of Greene made a strong impression on 
the people of Somerset. Vigorous in mind and body he was ever 
actively alert in behalf of the cause for which he had drawn his 
sword, and was much beloved by his friends while feared by his 
foes. Being enterprising and full of resources, he was con- 
sidered as dangerous as his chief, and Cornwallis is reported to 
have said that he never felt secure when encamped in hisneigh- 
26 



402 The Story op an Old Farm. 

borhood. . In case of Washington's death it was generally- 
admitted by the country that Grreene of all others was most fitted 
for the chief command. 

At Basking Ridge this general's headquarters were at Lord 
Stirling's handsome residence, where Lady Stirling and her 
attractive daughter, Lady Kitty, made most agreeable hostesses. 
At this time this manor-house was the seat of hospitality, refine- 
ment and luxury ; great sociability prevailed, and many friends 
were welcomed with old-fashioned heartiness. There was no lack 
of excellent society in the neighborhood. The Presbyterian 
clergyman, Doctor Kennedy, was a man of education and good 
breeding whose friendship was sought by all. The home of the 
distinguished Mr. Southard was near by, and, in addition, many 
exiles who were socially prominent had found secure retreats 
among these Bernard hills. On the main road, a little below 
the church, John Morton of New York had established himself 
on a farm recently purchased. His dwelling was spacious, and 
as it was filled with furniture, silver, books, pictures and mirrors 
it made an imposing and attractive homestead. The young people 
of this household proved to be an interesting addition to the vicin- 
ity, as they were engaging in manners and appearance, and 
intent on making the most of their enforced seclusion. One of the 
daughters became the wife of the celebrated Josiah Quincy of 
Boston, and the eldest son, Jacob, after the war won an honor- 
able place at the New York bar. His younger brother, Wash- 
ington, distinguished himself in 1797 by running off with, and 
marrying, Cornelia Schuyler, Mrs. Hamilton's sister ; — doing it, 
too, with all the appropriate melodramatic touches and features 
properly incidental to such an affair, including midnight, moon- 
light, a ro})e ladder, and a hasty flight on horseback. On Mr. 
Morton's farm a hospital was located, which continued there for 
two years, its doctors, Tilton, Stevenson, and Coventry adding not 
a little to the neighborhood's social coterie. Haifa mile away 
Elias Boudinot of Elizabethtown had established his family in 
two farm-houses, and his sister, Mrs. Hatfield, was not far oflF 
with her family. Mr. Boudinot's only daughter, Susan, a charm- 
ing girl of twelve, was frequently at the great house as the guest 
of the ladies Stirling. This young girl was .the apple of her 
father's eye. He thus speaks of her in a letter to General 



Society at Basking Ridge in 1777. 403 

Lincoln, dated " Elizabethtown, Oct. 5, 1784," — "This moment 
I arrived here, on my way to Philadelphia, accompanying my 
little ewe lamb to the city, having given her away to a certain 
Mr. Bradford." This ^' ewe lamb" in her twentieth year mar- 
ried^ William Bradford of Pennsylvania, afterwards attorney- 
general of the United States. He died in 1795, but his widow 
survived, so I have heard, until 1854. 

Altogether, we may imagine that General Greene and the 
young men of his staff discovered that their lines had fallen in 
very pleasant places when they found themselves domesticated 
in a family made up of intelligent, cultivated and elegant women. 
To the historical student old letters are highly interesting, as 
they often throw powerful side lights on, and bring into clear 
relief, scenes and incidents of much interest. They restore a 
dead past to a warm, breathing present, and their value is the 
greater because of their writers having been ignorant that they 
were contributing to pages of history or biography. So it is that 
in a letter written by Greene to his wife, from Basking Ridge, 
we obtain a glimpse of social life at the Stirling mansion, and are 
introduced to Governor Livingston's daughters who must have 
contributed largely to the pleasure of the general and his aides 
while they quartered with the household. He writes : — 

They are three young ladies of distinguished merit, sensible, polite, and easy. 
Their manners are soft and engaging; they wish to see you here, and I wish it, 
too ; but I expect long before that happy moment to be on the march toward 
Philadelphia. 

When the British overran Union county Governor Livingston 
was forced to abandon his Elizabethtown residence, Liberty 
Hall. While he was here, there, and everywhere, serving the 
state and aiding Washington, his family spent the winter with 
Lady Stirling, who was Governor Livingston's sister. In the 
spring the governor established a home on a farm at Parsippany 
to which he could retreat when necessary. But even there, 
several unsuccessful attempts were made by refugees to capture 
the chief-magistrate, for whom a standing reward was offered by 
the enemy. The Livingston young ladies were exceedingly 
popular, and highly considered by the best people of that day, 
their many physical and mental graces often acting as social oil 
upon the troubled waters of that turbulent time. Their exper- 



404 The Story of an Old Farm. 

iences during the war, both while visiting the army as the guests 
of Mrs. Washington, and while at home in Elizabethtown, were 
of the most varied character. On one occasion Susan, the second 
daughter, by her cleverness, aided perhaps by her personal 
charms, was the means of preserving her father's most valuable 
papers ; this was at a time when a marauding band of the enemy 
were ransacking Liberty Hall. She was considered a wit in 
Revolutionary circles, and many of her bright sayings have been 
preserved ; the following would show that British, as well as 
American, officers enjoyed her society and appreciated her 
humor. It was in New York, at the time of the evacuation, 
that in conversation with Major Upham, one of Lord Dor- 
chester's aides, she expressed the hope that the English would 
soon depart; "for," said she, "among our incarcerated belles the 
scarlet fever must rage till you are gone." The major cleverly 
replied that he feared the ladies would be tormented by a worse 
malady, the " blue devils." After the war Susan married John 
Cleves Synimes, who had been colonel of the 3rd Battalion, 
Sussex militia, but who resigned on the twenty-third of May to 
accept appointment as associate-justice of the New Jersey 
supreme court. Her oldest sister, Sarah, who was decidedly the 
beauty of the family, had, long before, married John Jay, and 
was a social star in Philadelphia society during her husband's 
presidency of congress, and also at the French and Spanish 
capitals while Mr. Jay was his country's representative abroad. 
The governor's youngest daughter, Kitty, married Matthew 
Ridley of Baltimore, and he having died, she in 1796 became 
the wife of John Livingston of Livingston Manor. 

To return to the continental army ! For this year, 1777, mat- 
ters were at the lowest ebb in February; at one time in that 
month it is claimed that fifteen hundred men could not have been 
mustered in Washington's camp. But this condition of affairs, 
which the enemy happily did not discover, rapidly mended. As 
the spring advanced the force at Morristown was gradually 
augmented by recruits-who had been enlisted for the new army 
by the different states. The second establishment of eighty- 
eight battalions, of which the New Jersey quota was four, had 
been authorized by congress in the preceding September. New 
Jersey's first battalion was in readiness in December, and the 



General William Maxwell. 405 

three others in February and April. They were brigaded under 
General William Maxwell, who had commanded the 1st Sussex 
regiment. This brigade formed part of Major-General Adam 
Stephen's division which lay during the spring and early sum- 
mer in the vicinity of Elizabethtown, Rah way, and Bound Brook. 
The enlistment of this establishment was for the war, and while 
hostilities lasted the New Jersey line was an important element 
in the continental army and did most excellent service. Before 
the end of May in 1778 a new organization was established 
whereby the New Jersey battalions were reduced to three, this 
being made necessary because of the ranks having been deci- 
mated by battle and disease. Maxwell continued in command 
until July, 1780, when he resigned, being succeeded by Colonel 
Elias Dayton of the 3rd New Jersey regiment, who remained at 
the head of the brigade until the troops were discharged on the 
third of November, 1783. 

General William Maxwell's memory and reputation are worthy 
of a higher place in history than they have attained. We find that 
now the names of other Revolutionary generals are better known 
and more highly considered, whose services to the country did 
not equal in importance and value those of the brave command- 
ant of the Jersey line. This to some extent is due to the fact of 
his correspondence and all biographical material having been 
lost just after the Revolution when his house was destroyed by 
fire. Maxwell early made the acquaintance of Washington, 
having campaigned with him in Braddock's unfortunate expedi- 
tion. Throughout the French and Indian wars his services as 
an officer of the provincial troops were noteworthy, and he bore 
himself with honor under Wolfe at the taking of Quebec. In 
1776 he was chairman of the Sussex county committee of safety 
and colonel of the 1st Sussex battalion of militia, in which Johan- 
nes Moelich's son Andrew commanded a company. He early 
attained the rank of brigadier-general in the continental line, 
and so conducted himself daring the war as to win in an eminent 
degree the special regard of Washington. He died in 1796 in 
his sixty-third year, and lies buried within the shadows of the 
walls of the First Presbyterian church of Greenwich in Warren 
county. 

By the last of April the army rejoiced in the possession of new 



406 The Story of an Old Farm. 

muskets of a uniform pattern, two vessels having arrived from 
France bearing twenty-four thousand stand of arms. In that 
month there reached camp a man who had already won golden 
opinions as a soldier, and who was destined to do yet greater 
things for the country. This was Colonel Daniel Morgan, who 
appeared at the head of one hundred and eighty stalwart rifle- 
men, a command that was afterwards recruited to a regimental 
standard, and known as the 1 1th Virginia or " Morgan's Rangers." 
This officer was long of limb, possessed great strength and mus- 
cular activity, with a face which, though scarred by an ugly 
wound received in the old French and Indian war, plainly 
indexed a character full of inherent strength, good humor, hon- 
esty and self-reliance. He was a Jersey man, having been born 
in Hunterdon of Welsh parentage in 1736. He early left home 
to seek his fortune, and finding his way to Virginia became a 
teamster. As such, Morgan with his own wagon, and horses 
accompanied Braddock on his unfortunate expedition. This 
made him a soldier, for his military instincts soon caused him to 
exchange the reins for a musket. 

How time avenges one ! After the fall of Yorktown, Morgan, 
then a bi'igadier-general, was invited to dine with some of the 
captured British officers at Winchester, who were in his charge. 
In conveisation with Captain Samuel Graham — afterwards 
Lieutenant-General Graham — the American officer playfully 
remarked that the British still owed him a lash from a w^iip. 
On being asked for an explanation, he told of his having driven 
a wagon in the early years of the French and Indian war ; for 
some grave irregularity he was sentenced by court-martial to 
receive five hundred lashes. He got but four hundred and 
ninety-nine, as he counted them himself as they fell, and after- 
wards convinced the drum-major, who wielded the whip, of his 
mistake. Private Morgan's bravery in 1758 secured for him an 
ensign's commission from the governor of Virginia. At the out- 
break of the Revolution he raised in that colony a company of 
ninety-six young marksmen, all skilled in woodcraft, and with 
them joined the army that assailed Quebec. He proved a brave 
and an adroit fighter, winning even British enconiums for the 
courage displayed in the assault. After the wovmding of Arnold 
he was captured, and so marked had been his conduct in that 



Colonel Daniel Morgan. 



407 



affair that the enemy offered him a command, which he indig- 
nantly declined. After eight months' captivity he was 
exchanged, and, as we have seen, joined Washington's army. 
Thenceforward he shared in the hardships of every campaign 
until the summer of 1779, when his shattered health forced him 
to resign. When the unhappy tide of war, flowing southward, 
rose to a flood in the Carolinas, and Gates exchanged his north- 
ern laui'els for the willow of defeat at Camden, Morgan again 
offered his services to the country. As " General Morgan " he 
became Greene's most trusted lieutenant, and in January, 1781, 
he covered himself and the southern army with glory, while win- 
ning the battle of Cowpens without the aid of a single piece of 
artillery. The " old wagoner" fulfilled the promise he made his 
men " that he would crack his whip over the head of Ben Tarle- 
ton in the morning as sure as he lived." 




CHAPTER XXVIII. 

The Continental Army in Somerset County in the Spring and 
Summer of 1777 — Scenes and Incidents at Bound BrooJc 
and 3Iiddlebroo]i — British Efforts to March to the Dela- 
ivare Defeated. 

There was fighting at Bound Brook on Sunday, the thirteenth 
of Aprih Early that morning General Lincoln was surprised, 
and narrowly escaped capture with his entire force. This officer, 
while a brave soldier and estimable in private life, was more 
than once singularly unfortunate in his military enterprises. 
Bancroft characterizes him as being heavy of mould and inert of 
will ; he was certainly caught napping at this time, for his 
patrols must have been improperly placed or thoroughly ineffi- 
cient. 

The enemy, four thousand strong, advanced in three divisions 
under Generals Lord Comwallis, Grant and Matthews, with Count 
von Donop in command of a body of Hessians and yagers. The 
troops marched from New Brunswick at nine o'clock on Satur- 
day night, and the expedition was conducted with so much 
secrecy that but few of the inhabitants knew of their departure 
until Sunday morning. One division crossed the Raritan at 
Van Vegh ten's bridge — Finderne, one at Raritan Landing, and 
the third in front of Bound Brook. It is said that the Brit- 
ish, in marching, avoided the roads ; at all events they reached 
the American outposts, and there lay on their arms till daylight, 
their proximity entirely unsuspected. On Sunday morning 
long before breakfast the garrison of the block-house were 
greeted by a rattle of musketry, and a rain of ball clattering 
against the wooden walls of their stronghold. Two divisions of 
the enemy had simultaneously charged the town, while the third 



Fighting at Bound Brook. 409 

appeared on the opposite bank of the river. Before such an 
advance there was nothing to do but give way. General Lin- 
coln, whose troops did not number one quarter those of Corn- 
wallis, had no opportunity of forming his men, and barely time to 
get in the saddle and order a hasty retreat ; indeed so close was 
the foe that one of his aides fell in their hands before he could 
mount his horse. Some desultory, defensive firing was con- 
tinued for a time by a portion of his troops, but eventually they 
fell back to the mountain in the rear of the town, with the loss 
of two pieces of artillery and sixty men killed, wounded, and 
prisoners. Among the missing were Lieutenants Ferguson and 
Tumbull of Colonel Procter's 4th Artillery regiment, both of 
whom were well known and liked in the vicinity of Bound 
Brook. The latter was killed, but, later on, Ferguson was dis- 
covered to be among the captives ; he was not exchanged until 
December, 1780, and eleven years afterwards was shot dead in 
the battle of Maumee, under St. Clair, where as major in the 
regular army he commanded a battery of artillery. 

This sudden onslaught of the British filled the Bound Brook 
villagers with dismay, and, as panic-stricken as the troops, they 
deserted their homes and sought safety in flight. When the fii'- 
ing ceased and the smoke cleared away, the enemy found no one 
to dispute with them the possession of the place ; its only occu- 
pants were a dead soldier stretched in a pool of blood on the 
blockhouse floor, with a few more of the slain and some of the 
wounded lying singly or in heaps on the streets and in the 
adjoining fields. Considerable booty was secured, comprising a 
quantity of arms, two wagons loaded with ammunition, several 
horses, and about one hundred head of cattle and sheep. In 
addition, several hundred barrels of flour were destroyed, 
together with a lot of whiskey, rum, and other stores that the 
continental army could just then but illy spare. General Greene 
hurried to Lincoln's support, but Basking Ridge being twelve 
miles distant, it was after midday before his division reached 
Bound Brook ; by that time the enemy had evacuated the place, 
and retired to Raritan Landing A detachment was at once 
despatched to hang on their rear ; that night this pursuing party 
surprised the British pickets, killed one officer and seven privates, 
and brought away sixteen prisoners. Greene, in wTiting to his. 



410 The Story of an Old Farm. 

wife of the excitements and incidents of the day, related that he 
had dined in the same house at which Generals Cornwallis and 
Grant had breakfasted in the morning. This was the Van 
Home mansion, still to be seen on the turnpike adjoining Middle 
Brook on the southwest, and of which there will be more to tell 
hereafter. 

The villagers on returning to Bound Brook with the troops 
looked with rueful eyes and loud lamentations upon the devasta- 
tion perpetrated by the soldiers during their short stay. Imme- 
diate steps were taken to restore order and repair damages ; 
help and comfort for the. troops at least, soon coming from the 
outside. At two o'clock Lord Stirling wrote from Basking 
Ridge to General Lincoln : — 

It has just occurred to me that a little refreshment for your men will be no 
disagreeable acquisition to you; I have therefore ordered 600 lbs. of beef, three 
barrels of flour, and twenty gallons of rum to be sent you instantly. I have 
ordered Dr. Barnet and Dr. Boylan at Boylan's tavern to care for any wounded 
men you may send there. Whatever you may stand in need of let me know and 
I will endeavor to supply it. 

Surgeon William M. Barnet was of the 1st New Jersey regi- 
ment, second establishment, which had but recently been 
organized. Doctor Boylan was a son of John Boylan the Phick- 
amin storekeeper, and his practice being in the vicinity of 
Basking Ridge he was probably Lord Stirling's family physi- 
cian. This affair at Bound Brook caused much concern to the 
commander-in-chief; it shoAved conclusively that the post was 
one of exposure and danger, and great anxiety was felt lest a 
second attack should be attended with even more disastrous 
residts. It had been hoped that an advance on the enemy might 
be made to advantage, but after Greene had reconnoitred 
their position and examined the condition of the American posts 
it was deemed unwise to make the attempt. It appeared that 
the British were massing troops in Piscatawa^' township, and 
fears were had that some stroke was in contemplation. On the 
nineteenth of April, Greene in a letter to Lincoln giving the 
results of his reconnoissance writes as follows : — 

His excellency wishes you to keep a good look out. He thinks that the cannon 
with you are in a dangerous situation and will in a great degree be useless if the 
enemy make an attempt to surprise you. He therefore wishes you to send them 
io Morris Town immediately and only consider Bound Brook an advance Piquet. 



General Benjamin Lincoln. 411 

The general thinks you had better order all the stores back between the first and 
second mountain and draw your daily supplies from there. 

The letters of General Greene and Lord Stirling both express 
the kindest feeling towards Lincoln, and they fairly typify the 
sentiments with which that general was universally regarded by 
his brother officers. He was respected as a man of ardent patri- 
otism and heroic courage, and although his vigorous and usually 
judicious military efforts were as a rule requited by the frowns 
of fortune, he never lost his popularity or the confidence of the 
army, congress and the commander-in-chief. He had been a 
farmer until over forty years old at Hingham, Massachusetts, and 
all he knew of the soldiers' art before the war was gained as a 
militia officer. At the outset of the Revolution, after serving in 
tlie provincial congress and as one of the committee of corres- 
pondence he was appointed major-general by the council of Mas- 
sachusetts, and in October, 1776, at the head of the militia of 
his state joined the main army at New York. He soon displayed 
great ability as a commander, which, together with his upright 
character and undoubted merit, induced Washington to recom- 
mend him to congress, whereupon in February, 1777, that body 
created him a major-general on the continental establishment. 
Though his inherent qualities and superior powers were pro- 
nounced, his military misfortunes were proverbial. At Bound 
Brook, at Stillwater, at Savannah and at Charleston, misadven- 
ture followed him. He was certainly of importance in promot- 
ing the capture of Burgoyne, but unhappily was deprived of 
sharing in the glories of the capitulation, having a few days 
before received a painful wound, which obliged him to retire to 
Albany, and from the effects of which he never wholly recov- 
ered. Lincoln's spotless reputation remained untarnished even 
after he had lost Charleston and the southern army, and in Octo- 
ber, 1781, after conducting himself with credit before Yorktown, 
where he received the submission of Cornwallis's army, congress 
chose him to be secretary of war. The general was long remem- 
bered at Bound Brook as an erect, broad-chested man, having a 
frank, open countenance, with an aspect rather venerable and 
benign. His indefatigable perseverance and unconquerable 
energy won the citizen's admiration, and, though genial-by nat- 
ure and easily approached, his mere presence invariably pro- 



412 The Story of an Old Farm. 

yoked respect. It is said that, always himself correct and chaste 
in conversation, none dared when with him to indulge in profan- 
ity or in levity on serious subjects. 

There was another arrival from Vii-ginia that spring at Mor- 
ristown, which excited great interest. It was that of Brigadier- 
General John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, who had left New Jer- 
sey in 1772 as an humble Lutheran clergyman. He was warmly 
welcomed by the Germans of the New .fersey hill-country, but 
they found it difficult to grow accustomed to his continental blue 
and buff and military trappings. So much glitter and sheen 
seemed a strange metamorphosis from the modest canonicals of 
their old German pastor ; but it was the same man, with the 
same great affections and merry heart, that had left them five 
years before, and he found many friends who delighted in his 
return. We may be sure that the general went out of his way 
to visit his old parishioners living in the Bedminster stone house. 
He covdd not have had other than pleasing remembrances of his 
past intimacy with Aaron Malick, who had been an active and 
leading member of his congregation, and two of whose children 
he had baptized. From these circumstances we may fairly 
fancy the warm reception extended to the parson-soldier as his 
burly form darkened the doorway of the living-room, and his 
hearty tones called down, in the good old German pastoral fash- 
ion, blessings on all in that house. 

The attachment felt by the people of Zi(m and St. Paul's con- 
gregations toward their former rector was not only because of the 
faithfulness with which he had ministered his holy calling; he 
had endeared himself to them by the sympathy and affection 
with which he had entered into all their daily affairs. While 
ever ready to sorrow when they sorrowed, he was equally quick 
to rejoice in their happiness. He was a part of their life — of 
their pleasures as well as of their pains. With them he fished 
the streams, with them he roamed the hills for game ; he could 
dance as well as pray, and no festive occasion was complete 
without his presence. Evidently this clergyman's Christianity was 
not of the gloom}' kind. In his visit to London, after leaving 
New Jersey, he did not hesitate to enter in his journal that he 
and a brother minister had visited the theatre to see David Gar- 
rick. The reason of his going abroad was the necessity of 



General Peter Muhlenberg. 413 

•obtaining ordination from an English bishop, as in Virginia the 
rector of no denomination could enforce the collection of tithes 
unless regularly ordained. 

When Muhlenberg reached his parish in the Old Dominion, 
his personal qualifications and high character soon won from his 
new people the same love and respect that he had enjoyed from 
those of New Jersey, and it was not long before his popularity 
throughout the entire valley of the Blue Ridge was unbounded. 
By his skill with the rifle he shot his way into the affections of 
many a frontiersman, and his love of hunting brought him the 
companionship of not a few of the leading men of that hunting- 
loving province — among them, Patrick Henry and Washington. 
With the latter he often explored the mountains with horses, 
hounds and horns in search of deer, and it is said that in the 
use of his favorite weapon he found himself the peer of his 
illustrious companion. The friendship thus formed proved last- 
ing, and was probably largely influential in transforming the 
country parson into a Revolutionary soldier. Muhlenberg 
became the political as well as the religious leader of the Ger- 
mans in the colony. He was untiring in his endeavors to 
quicken the patriotic impulses of his people, and when the clouds 
of discontent and apprehension began to darken the political 
horizon the prominent whigs of Virginia found in him a most 
important and valuable ally. He was made a member of the 
Virginia convention, became the chairman of the committee of 
correspondence for his county, and in December, 1775, was com- 
missioned as colonel of the 8th Battalion — known as the German 
regiment. When bidding good-bye to his congregation in Janu- 
ary, 1776, at the close of his sermon he announced that he 
believed with Holy Writ that there was a time to preach and a 
time to pray, but that those times had passed away ; then, with 
increased emphasis, he cried out with dramatic fervor that there 
was also a time io fight! and that that time had now arrived ! — 
thereupon he suddenly threw off his gown, and stood before his 
people in the full uniform of a continental colonel. At a signal, 
drummers, who had been stationed outside the door, beat a stirring 
march, and Muhlenberg, displaying a list, solicited recruits. 
Nearly three hundred German Lutherans enrolled their names, 
infusing into his regiment au element which caused it to be dis- 



414 The Story of an Old Farm. 

tinguished throughout the war for bravery and discipline. In 
February, 1777, Colonel Muhlenberg was appointed a brigadier- 
general, and, being assigned the 1st, 5tli, 7th and 13th Regiments 
of the Virginia line, was ordered to report to Washington at 
Morristown. Later his old regiment, the 8th, joined his brigade, 
which with General Weedon's formed Greene's division. One 
need have but a slender acquaintance with Revolutionary history 
to be familiar with how ably this soldier of the Cross served his 
country as a soldier in the field; how well he proved the truth of 
the sentiment he had expressed in the peroration of his farewell 
sermon — that there was a time to pray and a time to fight ; and 
how equal he always was to the requirements of either occasion. 
As the spring advanced, the British Avere displaying more 
activity in their camps, and an important movement was evi- 
dently in contemplation. At New Brunswick they were con- 
structing a portable pontoon bridge, and in many ways their 
operations indicated an intention of soon attempting the passage 
of the Delaware. Washington deemed it wise to post his army 
in a stronger position so as to be better able to check the enemy 
in any overland endeavor to reach Pennsylvania. He selected 
the heights in the rear of Bound Brook, or Middlebrook, and 
directed that an encampment should be laid out on the side of 
the hill below Chimney Rock, to the right of the gorge through 
which Middle brook descends. Under the new establishment the 
immediate force of the commander-in-chief was forty-three regi- 
ments from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia and 
Maryland. The brigades, of which there were ten, were under 
Generals Muhlenberg, Weedon, Maxwell, Wayne, Smallwood, 
Woodford, De Boore, De Haas, Conway and Scott. There were 
five divisions of two brigades each — commanded by Major-Gen- 
erals Greene, Sullivan, Stirling, Stephen and Lincoln. On the 
nineteenth of February congress had promoted Stirling, Stephen 
and Lincoln, and had made brigadiers of Colonels Wayne, Muh- 
lenberg, Weedon, Woodford and De Haas. The muster-rolls 
showed the army to contain eight thousand three hundred and 
seventy-eight men, of whom but one hundred and eighty were 
cavalry. This made an average brigade strength of but little 
more than eight hundred rank and file. Of this small force 
upwards of two thousand were sick, leaving less than six thous- 



Camp Middlebrook in 1777. 415 

and men fit for active service, one-half of whom were raw 
recruits who had never met the enemy. 

On the twenty-third of May General Greene, and Colonel 
Clement Biddle the commissary-general, reached Camp Middle- 
brook, and the necessary orders were immediately issued for 
withdrawing the troops from the different outposts and massing 
them at that place. On the twenty-fourth the regiments began 
to come in, and laying out the encampment was regularly com- 
menced. In following Kevolutionary paths through this portion 
of New Jersey we often come upon the footprints of Colonel 
Biddle. He was a Philadelphian, and had been a member of 
the Society of Friends, but when the war cloud gathered his love 
of liberty and country proved greater than the inherent devotion 
to peace which is generally considered to be the paramount 
feature of Quaker natures. Because of taking up arms he was 
read out of meeting, and Mrs. Biddle for supporting his course 
was subjected to the same discipline. In the quartermaster and 
commissary departments, he was a most faithful officer from 
July, 1776, till September, 1780, and his services were highly 
appreciated by Generals Washington and Greene. Mrs. Biddle 
supported her husband's course in deed as well as in word, and 
formed one of the little coterie of ladies whose society so often 
made Revolutionary camp life attractive. 

On the twenty-seventh Washington made a preliminary exam- 
ination of the new position and its vicinity, and on the follow- 
ing day moved with the main army from Morristown to Middle- 
brook. And now the troops were finally disposed so as to guard 
against surprise, and to deceive the adversary. Putnam was 
relieved by Sullivan, who, with an augmented force of fifteen 
hundred men, posted himself in the neighborhood of the Sour- 
land hills to act as a menace to any advance-guard that the 
enemy might send forward. Maxwell was stationed on the left, and 
small guards were posted at Millstone, Pluckamin, Quibbletown 
andWestfield, and the mountain gap at Steel's tavern and other 
passes were fortified. Colonel Morgan, with his rangers was posted 
as an outguard at Van Veghten's bridge. He was instructed to 
keep small scouting parties in the vicinity of the roads leading 
from New Brunswick to Millstone and Princeton, and in case of 
discovering bodies of the enemy moving in those directions he 



416 The Story of an Old Farm. 

was to fall upon and gall their flanks. Morgan probably quar- 
tered with Derrick Van Veghten, a patriotic old gentleman 
whose better acquaintance, later on, we shall have the pleasure 
■of making. And now we find Washington biding his time, 
watching from his eyrie for every sign or incident indicating on 
the part of the enemy an intention to advance. Meanwhile both 
officers and men found plenty to do ; earth-works were thrown up, 
cannons so mounted as to sweep the plain below, huts and store- 
houses erected, and much time was devoted in endeavoring to 
transform raw recruits into something approaching disciplined sol- 
diers. Commissaries were soon flying around among the farm- 
ers, and for some weeks to come Middlebrook camp was an 
excellent market for sheep and cattle. Farm-kitchens and cel- 
lars were ransacked for cider vinegar — then considered a sover- 
eign remedy for camp fever, which was found to prevail in some 
brigades, produced by a too continuous flesh diet. The supply 
soon became exhausted, and a substitute was made with rum, 
molasses and water, a little flour being added to produce fermen- 
tation So, two weeks or more passed away, until the army was 
just beginning to wonder Avhether Howe purposed summering on 
the Raritan, when suddenly the campaign opened. 

On the morning of Sunday the fourteenth of June the inhabi- 
tants of Franklin township were made acquainted with the ])ict- 
orial eftect of war to an extent not before enjoyed — if such a 
word can be used in speaking of a display made by an enemy. 
All through the previous night, along the Amwell road and along 
the road following the west bank of the Raritan, had been heard 
the hollow tramp of marching men — the rumbling of artillery — 
the sound of countless hoof-beats — the blast of bugles — and the 
sharp tones of military command. At daybreak rank upon rank 
of soldiers with guidons and pennons fluttering were seen sweep- 
ing along these highways and occupying the country that inter- 
vened between Millstone and New Brunswick. Everywhere 
were troops, and still troops ! They stood in compact masses — 
they bivouacked in the fields — the eye swept down long lines of 
color and along ranks of glittering steel ; the rising sun, flashing 
on helmets of brass and bathing royal standards proudly floating 
over well-equipped battalions, illumined a scene unusual indeed 
for Somerset people. This was no army formed of men, hungry. 



The Pictorial Effect of War. 417 

tattered, worn-out by the marches thej had made, but a well- 
fed, gaily apparelled force, strong with the refreshment of long 
quiet. Here were Anspachians and Waldeckers, the first, 
sombre in black leggings and dark blue uniforms, the second, 
:gaudy with many hues and tricked out in foreign finery. There, 
a regiment of Scotch, stalking by as if on their own breezy 
highlands, national and picturesque in bare knees, flowing kilts, 
and tartaned bonnets. Neat, graceful English grenadiers offered 
a complete contrast to the more heavily-accoutred German foot- 
soldiers ; while sturdy Hessian yagers with yellow housings and 
dangling scabbards, and squadrons of British dragoons in all 
the splendor of glint and color, added to the brilliancy of the 
picture. Such soldiers seemed only to need the word of com- 
mand to make their way to the Delaware or to any other point 
to which they might be ordered. 

On the night of the thirteenth. General Howe, leaving two 
thousand men at New Brunswick, marched, nearly fifteen thous- 
and strong, in the direction of the American camp. The army 
moved in two divisions, one, under De Heister, along the 
Amwell road through Middlebush, the second, under Corn- 
wallis, along the river road, filing to the left at the cross-road 
running into it three miles from New Brunswick. In the morn- 
ing the troops came to a halt with the right of the army at Mill- 
stone, while the left rested on the river. This was indeed an 
advance in force. There no longer seemed any reason for ques- 
tioning that the objective point was to be Philadelphia. But 
the British general, profiting by past experiences, was wary, and 
his first desire was to cripple the American army. So, instead 
of marching southward and exposing his flanks, he presented 
his front to Washington, hoping that the American general would 
come down from his stronghold and give him battle. 

Naturally the question suggests itself, — why did Howe, hav- 
ing twice Washington's force, hesitate to push on directly to the 
Delaware ? Several excellent reasons operated on the mind of 
the British general. Had his successor, Sir Henry Clinton, on 
leaving Philadelphia the following year weighed the conse- 
quences equally well, he would not have lost on the march to 
Sandy Hook two thousand men. It must be remembered that 
the roads running towards the Delaware were narrow and in 
27 



418 , The Story of an Old Farm. 

many places bordered with trees, offering excellent ambuscades, 
and affording opportunities for the militia to pursue a guerrilla 
warfare, at which they were becoming adepts. Should he have 
moved in one column on a single road the narrowness of the way 
would have prevented a marching formation of over four files 
front. An army of fifteen thousand men with its batteries, bag- 
gage, and supply-trains, even if kept continually closed up, 
would stretch out at least six miles. Such a force, however, 
coidd not be prevented, owing to stoppages and accidents, from 
lengthening, so that it woidd be safe to say he would have been 
offering to the adversary an exposed flank of over eight miles. 
A forced march could not be made ; the arms and kits of the 
English soldiers weighed fifty pounds, those of the Hessians much 
more ; this, together with being encmnbercd with long trains, 
would have prevented a day's march averaging more than twelve 
miles. Thus five days would be consumed in reaching Phila- 
delphia were the marching continuous, which was, of course, 
not to be expected. The calamities that would result from such a 
movement must be apparent to all — they certainly were to Howe. 
With Washington hanging on his right flank and rear, — with 
Sullivan, who had been largely reinforced by militia, harassing 
his left flank, — with the entire line of march through a hostile 
country teeming with an armed population, the most severe 
losses would have been unavoidable. Like a scotched snake 
that drags its wounded length, the army would have left behind a 
trail of blood. Marching in two divisions by parallel roads 
would have but divided the difficulties and invited destruction to 
at least one of the columns. Howe was not willing to make the 
attempt until he had beaten Washington ; after that, he proposed 
to turn his attention to Sullivan, and thus clear the way for his 
advance. 

With the approach of the English all was stir and bustle in 
the American camp. The army paraded on the hillside, pre- 
pared to receive the enemy should an attack be attempted, but 
declining to abandon its strong position for the uncertainties of 
an engagement on the plain below. So the adversaries con- 
fronted and watched each other for five days, the British 
entrenching themselves somewhat, throwing up earth-works at 
Millstone and Middlebush. Meanwhile the militia flew to arms, 



Washington and Howe Face Each Other. 419 

and distributed in small squads made the stay of the enemy as 
uncomfortable as possible. Marksmen lurked behind the trees, 
or lay concealed under the fences. Unhappy the lot of the red- 
coat who wandered too far from camp — the forager who straggled 
too far from his party — or the picket who occupied a too extended 
line. Morgan's men were also ubiquitous ; like so many wasps 
they stung the foe at every turn. Joseph Clarke of the conti- 
nental army, in speaking of the conduct of the militia on this 
occasion, recites in his diary : — 

They turned out with such a spirit as will do them honor to the latest ages. 
Never did the Jerseys appear more universally unanimous to oppose the enemy ; 
they turned out young and old, great and small, rich and poor. Scarcely a man 
that could carry a musket was left at home. This soon struck a panic into the 
enemy, for they could scarcely stir from their camp but they were cut off. 

Howe continued to manoeuvre in front of the Americans hop- 
ing to bring on a general action, but Washington was too wise to 
permit his raw troops to cope with this veteran force unless it 
should be in the strong position he occupied. Some of the junior 
generals, quite willing to test the mettle of the new army, were 
eager for the fray ; among them Brigadier Anthony Wayne, an 
officer who was full of nervous energy and who always felt 
within himself the potentiality of great deeds. He urged that 
at least some side-stroke shoiild be attempted, and on the six- 
teenth of June, dating his letter from Mount Pleasant, he thus 
wrote to his division commander. General Lincoln : — 

The prisoners just brought in are a corporal and a private belonging to the 1st 
Eeg. of foot-guards. They say there is an encampment of the enemy on this 
side of Raritan, which is coniirtned by a deserter from the 28th, who says there 
are still live Keg's yet at Brunswick, three on the other side of the river, and two 
on this, just below the new bridge. One of them, the 26th, is very weak. Can't 
we beat up their quarters before sunrise? I am confident we can, my people are 
all ready to move at a moment's notice. The light horseman will await your 
orders. 

The commander-in-chief, however, would not permit any move- 
ment to be made ; his desires were all accomplished in barring 
the enemy's southern progress. On the nineteenth of June, 
Howe, desj^airing of attaining his purposes, suddenly retired with 
his army to New Brunswick. Three days later, on Sunday the 
twenty-second, the British entirely evacuated that place, retreat- 
ing to Perth Amboy. Greene's division, strengthened by 



420 The Stouy of an Old Farm. 

Wayne's brigade and Morgan's riflemen, had been dispatched down 
the right bank of the Raritan to harass the foe in the rear. Muh- 
lenberg led the advance, which circumstance offers excellent evi- 
dence as to the estimation in which the parson-soldier was held 
by his chiefs. In a pursuing column it is in the van, and in a 
retreating force it is at the rear, that the best generals are 
always placed. This expedition considerably hastened the 
departure of the British from New Brunswick, its field-pieces 
and riflemen causing them much annoyance. The pursuit con- 
tinued as far as Piscataway without doing much damage, as the 
rear of the retreating column was strongly and ably guarded by 
Cornwallis. It was expected that Sullivan and Maxwell would 
have cooperated wdth this movement ; Sullivan's orders came too 
late, and Maxw^ell did not receive his at all. Had these two divi- 
sions come to Greene's assistance the enemy's main body would 
probably have received severe punishment, and much wanton 
destruction of property prevented, for the British line of retreat 
was marked by blazing homesteads. 

When Howe fell back to Amboy, Washington, in order to be 
within supporting distance of Greene, moved with the main army 
to Quibbletown, — now- New Market. Historians are not agreed 
upon the question whether in retiring to Amboy the former really 
intended to evacuate the state, or whether it was a feint made to 
tempt Washington froin his strong position. Howe's report of 
these operations states that his troops were ready to cross to 
Staten Island, when discovery was made that the American army 
had advanced from ]\Iiddlebrook ; — that he then determined to 
renew the attempt to bring on an action. This can hardly be 
considered the best of evidence, for it w^as not uncommon for the 
British general to so fashion his reports as to convey impressions 
calculated to serve what he might happen at the time to cousifjer 
his best interests. Be this as it may, on Thursday the twenty- 
sixth Howe hurriedly marched in the direction of Westfield, 
hoping to push around to the rear of the Americans, and thus 
prevent their again reaching the heights. But Washington was 
too alert to be the victim of such strategy. The movement was 
in two divisions, one, under Cornwallis, by way of Woodbridge 
toward Scotch Plains, the other, under How^e, to Metuchen ; there 
the latter general expected to join the extreme left of the first 



Fighting Near Plainfield. 421 

column and then swing around the rear of the main American 
army, it being intended that the right of the combined British 
forces should stretch to and guard the mountain passes. It was 
thus that Washington was to be trapped. 

Nothing of the kind was effected. Morgan was soon hovering 
on Cornwallis's flank, and at Woodbridge a spirited engage- 
ment cost him a considerable number of men. When near 
Plainfield a force under Lord Stirling still further disputed the 
British advance, but after a sharp fight was obliged to retire to 
the mountains, though not until Cornwallis's plans had been effect- 
ually defeated. Stirling having prevented that general from 
reaching the heights it was useless for Howe to threaten 
Washington's front. The main American army was thus enabled 
to return in safety to Middlebrook. Cornwallis and his men, 
exhausted by rapid marching and the extreme heat, moved on 
in the direction of Westfield where they rested till the next 
afternoon. The column was then put in motion for Rahway 
where it again encamped. During the march Morgan's troops 
and a body of light-horse assailed the enemy mercilessly on their 
flanks and rear, as they did the following day when the column 
was again pushing toward Amboy. It was not till then that the two 
British divisions came together. Colonel Morgan's tireless services 
merited and received much commendation from the army, and 
special mention of his bravery was made by Washington in dis- 
patches to congress. His riflemen had been on continuous duty 
day and night since the nineteenth, when the enemy retired from 
Millstone, and his men, animated with the dash and spirit of their 
leader, had vied with each other in valorous deeds. In the vari- 
ous skirmishes occurring after Howe resumed the offensive the 
Americans lost in killed, wounded and missing about two hun- 
dred men, while the casualities of the British did not exceed one- 
third of that number. But the advantage lay by all odds on the 
side of the continental army, as it had completely frustrated the 
designs of the enemy. 

On Monday, the thirtieth of June, Howe and his army crossed 
to Staten Island on the pontoon bridge constructed at New Bruns- 
wick for use on the Delaware, bidding for that year a final adieu 
to the Jerseys. Napoleon defines the art of war as the talent of 
being stronger than the enemy at a given moment. The result 



422 The Story ob^ an Old Farm. 

of the game played between Washington and Howe showed that, 
however true this may be when opposing masses meet face to 
face for a supreme effort, there are surely exceptions to the rule 
when the elements of tactics and strategy enter into the contest. 
At such times the number of men is not invariably the standard 
of effective strength ; a most important factor must be considered 
— the genius of the respective leaders. Herein lies the secret 
of the checkmate received by the British. There is no doubt 
that General Howe ascribed great importance to the measures 
he had taken to tempt the American army from its stronghold, 
and thus bring on a general engagement. He had concentrated 
a force much greater in numbers and hoped to win the day by 
the superiority of his battalions. The withdrawal of his army to 
Stateu Island was an acknowledgment of the frustration of his 
entire plan — he had been foiled in all his manoeuvres and outgen- 
eraled in every movement. 

Thus ended the first invasion of New Jersey. Seven months 
occupation of the state by a thoroughly-equipped foreign army 
had resulted in nothing. The undisciplined forces of the Ameri- 
cans — through the genius of their leader and the spirit animat- 
ing officez's and men — had defeated every effort made by the 
enemy to penetrate beyond the Delaware, and most of the time 
had restricted them to the vicinity of the Raritan. Soon after 
crossing to Staten Island the British embarked on two hundred 
and seventy transports that were lying in the Lower bay. What 
Howe would next do was now the question in the American 
camp. Washington was at a loss whether to continue in Somer- 
set, so as to move quickly toward Pennsylvania should the British 
sail for the Delaware capes, or whether to march to the Highlands 
of the Hudson, fearing that the enemy might ascend the North 
river in order to combine with Burgoyne. There was at least 
no reason for longer perching on Middlebrook heights. Early 
on the morning of the second of July was heard the shout and 
din of breaking camp. Huts were dismantled, baggage-wagons 
were loaded and guns limbered. Soon the woods about Chimney 
Rock were echoing for the last time that year to drum-beats for 
assembly, and the men, with knapsacks packed and strapped, 
were hurrying to their different companies. Horses, ready 
saddled, pawed the ground in front of officers' quarters, and 



Howe Takes to His Ships. 423 

troops were in motion in every part of the camp. Washington 
had decided to march farther northward so as to be better able 
to move in either direction when Howe's intentions should be 
known. So again the people of Somerset witnessed what had 
now grown to be a no inconsiderable army marching along their 
highways, which by this time must have begun to grow familiar 
to many of the continental officers. 

On the afternoon of the fourth the troops encamped at Morris- 
town, where they remained for one week. Meanwhile the Eng- 
lish fleet was under sail, now heading up the Hudson, now cruis- 
ing in the sound, now bearing away for the Hook, each change of 
direction adding to the uncertainty and anxiety of mind of Wash- 
ington and his generals. On the eleventh it was determined to 
continue the march westward, but on "the following day the army 
was arrested at Pompton by a drenching rain storm. Washing- 
ton was ill at ease. This watching an enemy that was on board 
a fleet he fomid a very different business from standing on the 
brow of the " Blue hills," and surveying the foe on the plains 
below. He chafed sorely at this delay, but it was unavoidable ; 
the descending floods continued, the roads were choked with 
mud, and the Pequannock and Ramapo rivers were swollen into 
rapid torrents. A long halt not having been anticipated a con- 
centrated camp had not been pitched, the troops bivouacking, as 
best they could, in an extended line under the dripping trees 
that bordered the road. And so two very uncomfortable days 
were passed. The rain was incessant, the men were soaked to 
the skin, water trickled, dripped and splashed from caissons, 
wagons and saddles, while from the horses' sides and flanks rose 
a thick steam, which mingled with the aqueous vapors exuding 
from the soaked and spongy ground. 

On the fourteenth the column was again in motion, toiling over 
the miry and slippery Ramapo hills, and pushing on through the 
Clove to the Hudson which was reached on the twenty-second. 
The commander-in-chief though full of perplexity was ever 
watchful of the enemy, and as their latest move pointed sea- 
ward he again fell back with the greater part of his army to 
Pompton. Two days later — on the twenty-fourth — the mystery 
seemed solved, for on that day he wrote General Lincoln : — 

I have just received inforiuation that the fleet left the Hook yesterday, and as 



424 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

I think the Delaware the most probable place of their destination I shall move- 
the army that way. 

Sullivan and Lord Stirling's divisions, having been thrown 
across the Hudson, were recalled, the latter being ordered to 
march toward Philadelphia, the former to halt at Morristown. 
And now we again see the continentals — moving in several 
divisions — swinging their hurried way along the Somerset roads, 
which a hot July sun and thousands of trampling hoofs and feec 
had already made dusty. On Sunday the twenty-eighth ths 
eyes of Bedminster people looked with delight upon the con- 
spicuous and well known figure of Muhlenberg, mounted on a 
tall white charger with rich housings, riding at the head of four 
thousand troops. General Greene being absent on a few days' 
leave Muhlenberg had command of the division, and with him 
marched General Washington, and also General Knox with his 
artillery train of fourteen pieces and one howitzer. How the 
old parishioners of the German general must have marvelled at 
his strangely martial appearance ! As his erect form, amid his 
soldier comrades, passed along the familiar highways — crossing 
the north branch of the Karitan ; through the two Cross Roads ; 
crossing the Lamington ; over the gentle rises and through the 
pleasant valleys of Tewksbury ; on, in the direction of the Dela- 
ware — what comparisons must have been made with former 
days ; with those days when he rode this same country on 
errands of mercy and love, astride of a modest cob, wearing 
instead of epaulettes of bullion the livery of a Lutheran 
domine, and when in place of the swinging sword and warlike 
holster, were peaceful saddlebags stuffed with Bibles, prayer- 
books and sermons. 

On the thirtieth, Muhlenberg's division was resting at Coryell's 
ferry on the Delaware, having arrived on the twenty-eighth. 
This place being at the crossing of the old York road was one of 
the chief gateways to Pennsylvania, and is frequently mentioned 
in Revolutionary annals. On its site is now the flom'ishing city 
of Lambertville, which received its name early in this century 
from its first postmaster. As late as 1797 there were at this 
point but four dwelling houses. It was first settled in 1732 by 
Emanuel Coryell from Somerset county, who purchased a large 
body of land, built a hut, and established a ferry. Shortly after- 



Uncertainty as to Howe's Intentions. 425 

wards he erected a stone tavern, which, since occupied as a 
residence, continued in existence until within a few years. With- 
out doubt it was at this tavern that Washington, Knox, and 
Muhlenberg quartered while halting at the ferry. To expedite 
crossing the river the divisions of Stephen, which had marched 
from the Clove by way of Chester and Sussex Court-house, and 
Lincoln, which followed Muhlenberg's, reached the Delaware 
four miles above at Howell's ferry, now Stockton, while Lord 
Stirling's division, debouching south, rested at Trenton. On 
the thirty-first a courier was dispatched to hurry forward Sulli- 
van's division, an express having brought the news of two 
hundred and twenty-eight sail of vessels being at the capes of 
the Delaware. The next day, to Washington's great surprise 
and dismay, a second express announced that the fleet had sailed 
eastward. The clouds of doubt and uncertainty which had so 
happily seemed dissipated, again gathered, darkening the 
horizon. Once more it became necessary for a portion of the 
army to take up its line of march in the direction of the Hudson, 
Washington remaining in Pennsylvania so as to be near congress 
until Howe's intentions should be fully disclosed. This was a 
trying time for the troops. The heat was extreme, and the men 
suffered much fatigue and injury from their continuous and hur- 
ried marching along the dusty roads, and over the many hills 
that intervened between the Hudson and the Delaware. Wash- 
ington, in a letter to his brother from Germantown on the fifth of 
August, writes that since the British removed from the Jerseys 
the troops under his command had been more harassed by march- 
ing and countermarching than by any other thing that had hap- 
pened to them in the course of the campaign. 

Congress and the commander-in-chief were now kept for many 
days in a state of anxious suspense, the complete disappearance 
of the fleet rendering it uncertain whether Howe's next stroke 
was to be in the direction of the upper Hudson, of Philadelphia, 
or of Charleston. If in the latter, it was felt that the continental 
army was too distant to be of any avail ; consequently its dif- 
ferent divisions were distributed in Pennsylvania and New Jer- 
sey, ready to move quickly should time divulge that either of 
the other points was to be the destination of the fleet. To the 
great joy of every one, on the twenty-eighth of August Howe 



426 



The Story of an Old Fa km. 



showed his hand — all doubts were set at rest, for transports and 
convoys were discovered within the Virginia capes, and, with 
their canvas wings wide spread, standing fairly up Chesapeake 
bay. 




CHAPTER XXIX. 

The State of Religion in Neiv Jersey in the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury — The Effect of the Revolution on Public Morals — The 
Strong Reformed Dutch and Presbyterian Congregations of 
Bedniinster — Curious Church Customs. 

And so this extraordinary chase, unparallelled in the chronicles 
of warfare — a chase of an army on the sea by an army on the 
land — drew near to a finish. The continental divisions were 
quickly brought together, and the concentrated force, now largely 
increased by regiments from the south and by Pennsylvania militia, 
marched down the Delaware, the men elated that there was no 
longer any uncertainty as to the intentions of the enemy. 

But, as they are hurrying on to the inevitable collision, you 
^nd I, reader, must cry, halt ! We have for some time been 
drifting together on the tide of national history. This was all 
very well while that tide ebbed and flowed within our own state ;, 
but now that it has sought channels beyond the borders of New 
Jersey it behooves us to abandon the great historic figures in 
whose excellent company we have been, and turn again to the 
contemplation of a simpler form of humanity. As our story is 
essentially one of a place and people, we have no longer any 
excuse for following the fortimes of the continental army. By 
doing so we may invite the charge of aspiring to pen a history 
of the war for American independence ; for the desire to do this, 
or for the necessary ability for its accomplishment, we lay no 
claim. Ours the simpler duty of writing the story of an old 
farm, and as fascinating as the greater theme may be, we must 
not devote too much time to the historic interest of those won- 
derful years when a great nation was in the throes of its birth, 
and thus neglect those minor personal interests in which rest 



428 The Story of an Old Farm. 

the foundation of our work. It is only when the tumultuous 
waves of history sweep over the quiet neighborhood in which 
our narrative lies, that we may permit ourselves the pleasure of 
attempting the portrayal of scenes and incidents of national 
importance. We confess, however, to a feeling of regret at 
turning our backs upon the continental army. There is a singu- 
lar charm in either witnessing or participating in scenes where 
men contend together for mastery, and it is undoubtedly true 
that all human nature retains its primitive savage love of con- 
flict. Perhaps this may be why we deplore not being able at 
this time to follow the men of the Jersey line, as they tramp 
along with Washington's column to meet the enemy. We should 
like to witness the well-authenticated bravery of Muhlenberg, 
amid the w^hirl of combat on the Brandywine ; to peer through 
the dense fog that hung over that bloody sea of strife when the 
waves of success and defeat were surging back and forth on the 
streets of Germantown ; yes, even to share with our Jersey sol- 
diers the sufferings and privations of Valley Forge — but it is 
impossible. For all wars there must be a home-guard. To 
those by no means distinguished but still honorable ranks, we 
are assigned, for to preserve the plan of this work it is clearly 
our duty to remain near the home and haunts of our ancestors. 
The army will come again to Bedminster, wdien it will once more 
properly be within our province to delineate its fortunes. 

Upon returning to Somerset county we find it strangely quiet 
after the military turmoil of the preceding seven months. While 
some of its citizens had been bent on killing and maiming men, 
others more peacefully occupied had not neglected nurturing the 
land, ploughing, planting, and tilling the fields. Though not 
blind to the importance of all that was going on around them, 
still they had been guided by the ordinary considerations of the 
necessities of daily existence, and had continued to prosecute 
their various occupations, and so contributed — unwittingly and 
humbly — tow^ard fashioning the history of their time. In 
a great clock the small wheels seem of minor importance, yet did 
they fail to make their revolutions the entire mechanism would 
be useless, and the hands could no longer mark off on the dial 
the seconds, minutes, and hours of life. Society is a machine of 
intricate construction and delicate adjustments. Mankind, with 



Rigid Views as to Amusements. 429 

its many-sided characters and greater and lesser capacities, fur- 
nishes the motive power. Thus we find that all this time Bed- 
minster men, when not under arms on their monthly tours of 
militia duty, were engaged in turning the smaller social wheels, 
occupied themselves with their ordinary pursuits, performed their 
daily duties, and sought pleasure and amusement as if war were 
not. 

Those pleasures, it would seem, did not always keep 
strictly within legal bounds, for we find that in 1778 the Octo- 
ber terra of Somerset courts convicted John Schenck of breaking 
the law against horse-racing, and fined him ten pounds. This 
derelict who was guilty of so heinous an oifence against society 
was the son of Peter Schenck, a member of the provincial con- 
gress from Somerset county, one of the elders of the Hillsborough 
— Millstone — Reformed Dutch church, and the owner of the mills 
where is now Weston. The worthy elder probably grieved over 
his son's youthful peccadillos, but they did not prevent John's 
growing up to be a useful citizen. We may thank him, at least, 
for contributing to our knowledge of the rigid views held by our 
ancestors as to what they considered dangerous amusements. 
Would not these good men of the olden time have despaired of 
the republic had they foreseen that a century later their posterity 
would consider their forefathers' vices as virtues, and at state and 
county fairs offer tempting premiums to winning horseracers ? 
Could they, do you think, have been made to believe that in the 
year 1843 nearly seventy-five thousand people would witness the 
New Jersey mare, Fashion, trot for a purse of twenty thousand 
dollars ; that in 1889 the turf of the United States would give 
employment to thirty-five thousand men and boys ; that stakes 
in that year to the amount of nearly two million dollars would be 
won, and that almost as many persons would attend the races as 
inhabited the country when American independence was 
declared I 

While Washington and his men were at the front, assailing 
the enemy with lead and steel, the patriotic citizens at home 
were guarding the rear against the attacks of a much more 
insidious foe. Mention has been made in a previous chapter of 
the almost unlimited powers vested in the council of safety. 
Between the sessions of the legislature this important committee 



430 The Story of an Old Farm. 

kept a zealous oversight of the conduct of the citizens, sitting 
for that purpose at short intervals in different parts of the state. 
Then would be summoned to the presence of this august body 
both suspected and unsuspected persons — the one to explain as 
best they could their attitude toward the new republic, the other 
to testify as to what they knew regarding the daily walk, con- 
versation, and behavior of the people of their respective vicini- 
ties. From the fifteenth to the twenty-sixth of July (1777) the 
council of safety sat at New Germantown, in Hunterdon county. 
The following is an extract from the minutes of the meeting on 
Tuesday, the twenty-second instant : — 

Ordered that warrants be issued to apprehend and bring the following persons 
forthwith before the Government and Council of Safety, to take the oatli, etc., 
to wit : Cliristopher Vandevender, John Teeplen, T. Keeper, Jacob Eofl", Senr., 
Jacob Eoff, Junr., John Thompson, Samuel Siioy, Joseph Kelly, Thomas Willot, 
John P'ossey, Aaron Craig, John Castner, Senr., Jolin Castner, Junr., Abraham 
Castner, David King, Senr., and David King, Junr., of Pluckamin. Also James 
Castner, Peter Teeple, Samuel Perry, John Steel, Jacob Fussle, John Aupelman, 
Tice Aupelman, Philip Meelick, Jacob Castner, Peter Moelick, John Shaw, and 
Elisha Laurance, of the county of Somerset. 

The minutes of the council meeting, held on the twenty-fifth 

instant, recite : — 

Doctor Aaron Craig and John Teeple Tavernkeeper, appd. before the Board 
pursuant to citation and severally took and subscribed the Oaths of abjuration 
and allegiance agreeably to law. * * * Philip Meelick appeared before the 
Board pursuant to citation, and produced proof of his having taken tlie Oath 
agreeably to Law, on the 12th of this instant, whereupon he was dismissed. 

Nothinig is said of Peter Melick having presented himself 
before this council. It has already been shown that early in the 
war his loyalty was more than questionable, but that eventually 
he arrayed himself on the side of the government there is no 
doubt. We had supposed that before the time of the meeting of 
this committee he had again changed his attitude toward national 
affairs. It is not impossible that he may still have been "■ sulk- 
ing in his tent," but it is more reasonable to suppose that he was 
absent from the county, as no proceedings were instituted either 
against his person or to confiscate his property. Citation before 
the committee was not, necessarily, evidence of disaffection, as 
all male adults were required to take the oath of allegiance, and 
some of the firmest of patriots were peremptorily summoned 
to repair their negligence. During the few days that the com- 



Religious Blight During the Revolution. 431 

mittee of safety sat at New Germantown one hundred and 
eighty-three citations were issued, and one hundred and fifty- 
seven oaths administered. John Mehelm and William Paterson 
were present as members of the board, and the Reverend James 
Caldwell from Elizabethtown, and the Reverend Alexander 
McWhorter of Newark, appeared on the seventeenth before the 
committee to represent the exposed situation of Middlesex and 
Essex counties, and to petition for relief. 

On examining old Somerset reciords we are led to believe that 
to some extent this county escaped the religious blight that gene- 
rally fell upon the communities during the Revolution ; and that 
social morals were not permitted to sink to the low level of those 
of many other localities. That Bedminster township was pre- 
eminently favored in this regard is beyond dispute, and it can 
be attributed to the far-reaching influence on its people of its two 
strong Reformed Dutch and Presbyterian congregations, and 
their able ministers. During the early years of the eighteenth 
century the state of religion in New Jersey was at an exceed- 
ingly low ebb. Professing Christians were very lax in the out- 
ward observances of the forms of their faith, and in their daily 
lives gave but little evidence of the belief that was supposed to 
be theirs. All kinds of error and. practices prevailed in the 
churches ; conversion in the present sense of the term does not 
seem to have been a necessity for membership, and' in many 
instances even ministers do not appear to have been over- 
zealous in spiritual matters. 

Among the dissenting congregations it was the crying aloud 
in the wilderness of the ministers Theodorus Jacobus Freling- 
huysen of the Dutch churches of the Raritan valley, and Jona- 
than Dickinson of the Presbyterian congregations in the vicinity 
of Elizabethtown, that first aroused the people to the sense of 
their need of a more vital piety. The efforts of these divines 
were supplemented in 1740 by the earnest, and what was con- 
sidered almost inspired preaching of Whitefield, Tennent, 
Edwards and other eminent pastors of that time. A religious 
awakening ensued which had a most marked effect upon the 
morals, character and daily walk of the people. The churches 
were invigorated, and for a generation afterwards religion 
occupied a place in the thoughts and lives of the people that it 



432 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

liad never known before. As has been stated in a previous 
chapter, it is claimed that in the age following these religious 
teachers New England and New^ Jersey gave more thought to 
Christian philosophy and systematic theology than the same 
amount of population in any other part of the world. 

Interesting testimony regarding the severe opinions prevail- 
ing at that time as to frivolous and dangerous recreations, is 
furnished by the record of a meeting in 1767 of the consistories 
of the Bedminster, Raritan, and North Branch Reformed Dutch 
churches — then under one ministry. The fathers of the congre- 
gations had come together to suspend a member for attending a 
shooting match, for dancing and playing cards. They inscribed 
in Dutch on their book of minutes — as is shown by the transla- 
tion made for the Reverend Henry P. Thompson's " History of 
Readington Church " — the following as the result of their deli- 
brations : — 

Shooting matches are illegal, and contrary to the laws of the land, and afford 
inducement for the assembling of many idle and fickle persons, where nothing is 
ever transacted except that which is utterly useless, and usually ungodly. * * * 
Inasmuch as dancing is a wantonness unbecoming Christians, and a temptation 
to ileslily lusts, and besides an offence to the pious, especially in their time of 
need, therefore, those who indulge therein are to be admonished. * * * 
Those who, after admonition, continue to play with dice and cards, must not be 
allowed to come to tlie Lord's Supper, and if contempt for this discipline be 
manifested, they must, at last, be cut off from the church. * * * The conduct 

of is thus of great oHense to this church; and in addition thereto, 

he has shown contempt of that ecclesiastical oversight to which he solemnly 

promised to submit himself. Therefore, this consistory, because of the said 

continuance in such conduct, consider him an unworthy partaker of the 

Holy Sacrament, and hereby forbid iiim the use thereof, and lay him under cen- 
sure until he shall manifest sorrow and repentance. 

From the records of the Morristown Presbyterian church dur- 
ing the pastorate of the Reverend Timothy Johnes — 1742-1794 
— can also be obtained some interesting information as to what 
manner of social offences were visited with ecclesiastical con- 
demnation. In 1760 a man and his wife were disciplined for 
eating stolen watermelons — we are not informed who purloined 
the fruit. In 1766 a man was adjudged guilty of a '' premedit- 
ated first quarrel ;" and in 1772 another contentious brother was 
before the church '^ for taking hold of an antient man, a member 
of ye church, and shaking him in an unchristian and threaten- 
ing manner." For "ye premature marriage of wife's sister after 



Effect of the War upon Religion. 433 

first wife's death," the newly-married pair were brought before 
the session in 1786, but we are left in ignorance as to just what 
measure of time the worthy elders and deacons considered pre- 
mature. 

With the outburst of anger and acrimony engendered by 
British tyranny, that precipitated the Revolution, the Christ- 
ian zeal and fervor that had distinguished the members of the 
dissenting congregations received a serious check. The out- 
break of hostilities exerted a most unfriendly influence on religi- 
ous opinions, and the inhuman practices of war had a deadly 
effect on moral character. Tory and whig were alike too intol- 
erant of each other's convictions to square their conduct by 
Christian teachings. Both in social and political life hatred 
took the place of that broad and generous spirit which the laws 
of God demand shall govern citizens in considering the interests 
of a common brotherhood. The disintegration of society, the 
scattering of the members of congregations, and the frequent use 
of church edifices for military purposes, all tended to prostrate 
religious affairs, and to give them a minor rather than a para- 
mount importance. The business of the time was to kill, not to 
save, men. Campaigning drilled those finer feelings that had been 
bred under domestic influences and church teachings, profanity 
increased, cruelty and lawlessness usurped the place of brotherly 
affections, and scepticism and unbelief grew and became wide- 
spread. In some localities a community of Christian feeling was 
nearly exterminated, and the abandonment of all Sabbath obser- 
vances was the rule rather than the exception. This was espe- 
cially true of neighborhoods lying in the track of contending 
armies. The Presbyterian church buildings of Princeton, 
Mount Holly, Elizabethtown, Westfield, Newark, Springfield 
and Connecticut Farms ; the Dutch edifices of New Brunswick, 
Millstone and Raritan, and many others, were either entirely 
destroyed or so injured as to be unfit for service. Pertinent to 
the foregoing account of the condition of religion during the war 
is the following record taken from the books of Lamington 
church : — 

Bedminster, May 20th, 1778 — The Synod of New York and Philadelphia met at 
Bedminster in Somerset county, New Jersey, in consequence of an advertisement 
in the newspaper by the moderator, agreeably to advice of a number of the mem- 
28 



434 The Story of an Old Farm. 

bers, it not being practica le to meet in Philadelphia according to the adjourn- 
ment of last year, as that city is now in the possession of the enemy. 

At the meeting the assembled brethren said : — 

The Synod, taking into their most serious consideration that the lamentable 
decay of vital piety, for which we had so much reason to mourn for several years 
past, still continues ; that gross immoralities are increasing to an awful degree ; 
and that the ciilamities of war are yet permitted to afflict our land, do therefore 
agree to renew the recommendation of last Synod to all our congregations to 
spend the last Thursday of every month, or part of it, in fervent prayer to God 
that he would be pleased to pour out his spirit on the inhabitants of our land, 
prepare us for deliverance from the chastenings he hath righteously inflicted 
upon us for our sins; that he would graciously smile on our arms and those of 
our illustrious ally, by land and sea, and grant a speedy and happy conclusion to 
the present war. And it is earnestly recommended to the several Presbyteries 
to take care that this recommendation be complied with. 

Bedminster's religious interests did not suffer so much as the 
county's less fortunate and more southern townships. St. Paul's 
Lutheran congregation at Pluckamin, which had grown feeble, 
seems to have ended its existence, and its house of worship was 
alternately used as a prison and a stable ; but the other two 
strong congregations held firmly together, and continued to pre- 
sent a bold front to the wickedness of the times. The Reformed 
Dutch congregation at this period — 1777, '78 — was prosper- 
ing under the pastorate of Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh, who will 
be remembered as the young divinity student who in 1755 mar- 
ried Dinah Van Bergh, the widow of the Reverend John Fre- 
linghuysen. He was now in the prime of his years and useful- 
ness, and not only completely filled all the requirements of a 
spiritual shepherd, but so preached practical politics and the 
duties of citizenship as to imbue his hearers with the spirit of 
lions in the defence of their liberties, and in their resistence to 
oppression. Tories were not to be found among his regular 
auditors. Mr. Hardenbergh's patriotism was of the purest and 
loftiest typo. He was a member of the convention that formed 
the constitution of the state, and Washington frequently found in 
him a valuable counseller as to men and affairs of the vicinity. 
So ardent was this clergyman in the cause of freedom that the 
enemy early in the war offered a reward of one hundred pounds 
for his apprehension, and for several months he always slept 
with a loaded musket at his bedside. 

Late in the last century the minister was a much more 



Pastoral Visits in the Olden Time. 435 

important personage in the New Jersey communities than now. 
About liim centred not only the religious but the intellectual and 
educational influences of the neighborhood. Books were rare 
and costly, newspapers were few and did not reach regularly the 
interior country ; it was, therefore, from the pulpit that intelli- 
gence was disseminated. But it was not only preaching that 
was expected from the clergyman ; pastoral visits were an 
important part of his duties, and considered occasions of much 
consequence by the families of his congregation. At such times 
great preparations were made for receiving the man of God, 
who was looked upon with peculiar awe and veneration. The 
good-man of the house put on his Sunday clothes, the good-wife 
spread her most attractive board ; the children's brown feet were 
encased in shoes, and, dressed in their best, with their faces 
polished, they awaited with great fear and trepidation the severe 
ordeal of catechism and religious instruction. Prayers were 
offered at each visit, and with the coming and going of the 
minister a special blessing was felt to have fallen on the house- 
hold. 

At this time Mr. Hardenbergh's services were still divided 
between Bedminster, Raritan, and Readington, but each congre- 
gation had an able helper, or lay preacher, who conducted ser- 
vices on the days of the pastor's absence. On the Sunday that 
the minister officiated at Bedminster the people awaited his com- 
ing on the church-green. We may fancy him alighting from the 
conveyance in which he had driven over from the parsonage on 
the Raritan. With Dinah Van Bergh on his arm, and followed 
by a colored servant bearing the Bible and hymn-book, he made 
his way in a stately fashion amid the respectful and expectant 
throng to the church door. His people followed him in, but did 
not seat themselves until the domine, standing for a moment at 
the foot of the tall pulpit stairs, with his face buried in his hat, 
had breathed a silent prayer for help and guidance. When in 
his high perch he looked down on a very plain congregation. 
Many of his hearers had walked from home bare-footed, putting 
on their shoes only when nearing the church, and, in summer 
weather, the men did not hesitate to take off their coats and 
listen in their shirt sleeves. But they paid close attention to the 
long sermon — too often, perhaps, as was the manner of the age, 



436 The Story of an Old Farm. 

composedof dogma and polemics — and stored away each point in 
their minds for more leisurely digestion, and for use as arguments 
during the week in discussions in the fields, stores, and black- 
smith-shops. Hymn-books were few in those days ; the pre- 
centor, or " lining-deacon," still stood under the pulpit to '' raise 
the tune," and to read out in sonorous tones two lines of each 
hymn, the singing consequently being of a ludicrously disjointed 
and disconnected character. In their forms of worship the 
Dutch were tenacious of original methods, and strenously resisted 
all efforts at reform. Before this time some endeavor had been 
made to introduce hymn-books and continuous singing, but with- 
out avail, and it was not till after the close of the century that 
the ^'lining-deacon" ceased to be an institution in that denomi- 
nation. 

Long before the Revolution the Congregationalists and Presby- 
terians had introduced singing by note in their churches, but 
this innovation had been brought about only after long contro- 
versies, and much bitterness of feeling. The objections advanced 
against the change were many and curious, not to say, absurd. 
In the front rank, of course, stood that well-worn argument of 
all conservatives, — " that it was needless, the old way being good 
enough." But many honest people with '' dimly lighted souls " 
were fearful that the whole idea was a scheme of the evil one 
to undermine true religion. It was claimed that to abandon the 
ancient melodies in favor of new tunes would cause disturbances 
in the churches, grieve good men, and make the young dis- 
orderly, because taking them away from home influences while 
occupied in learning the new way of singing. In fact, the pro- 
posal created a great stir among the dissenters, and many of the 
pamphlets and articles published on the subject displayed much 
rancor and ignorance. Said one writer : — 

Truly, I have a great jealousy, that if we once begin to sing by note, the next 
thing will be to pray by rule, preach by rule, and then comes popery. 

In the Mendham Presbyterian church singing by note was 
introduced during the pastorate of Francis Peppard, which com- 
menced in 1764. To many of his people this innovation was a 
great offence ; one of the elders — Cummins, by name — ever after 
showed his repugnance to the choir by stalking out of church 
when singing began, not returning until its conclusion. Not- 



Sunday Booths on the Church Green. 437 

withstanding the opposition, this reform, like many others before 
and since, under the enlightenment of free discussion, finally pre- 
vailed in Congregational and Presbyterian denominations. But 
all this did not disturb the more phlegmatic Dutch, who at this 
time were well enough contented with their fathers' ways. In 
Bedminster church it was not until the year 1790 — when a new 
generation had largely outgrown not only the usages but the 
language of Holland — that the people would even consent to do 
away with having preaching at stated intervals in the Dutch 
tongue. As late as 1810 there was yet occasionally preaching 
in that language in some of the Raritan churches. 

At the period we have reached it was still the custom of the 
Bedminster congregation, as it continued to be for many years 
later, to listen to two long sermons on Sundays, with an inter- 
mission of but half an hour between each service. During this 
interval Mr. Hardenbergh conferred with his consistory, and 
exchanged greetings with members of -his flock ; while it was the 
practice of his wife to gather about her certain of the women, 
with whom she would discuss the sermon and hold converse on 
subjects of experimental religion. Meanwhile, the people 
generally, when the weather permitted, clustered in knots under 
the trees or rendezvoused beneath the white covers of their farm 
wagons, and ate the luncheons brought from home. Some of the 
neighborhood slaves, of good repute, were given the privilege of 
having stands on the church-green for the sale of root and malt 
beer, thick slices of buttered rye bread, sugared olekokes, Dutch 
crullers, and gingerbread. It was for these Sunday booths that 
the children saved their pennies, or eggs, which were equally 
current. They were the missionary boxes of that time, and con- 
stituted about the only ray of sunlight that crossed childhood's 
path on what must have been — if child-nature was the same as 
now — the gloomiest day of the week. 

" Hush ! 'tis the Sabbath's silence-stricken morn : 
No feet must wander through the tasselled corn; 
No merry children laugh around the door, 
No idle playthings strew the sanded floor ; 
The law of Moses lays its awful ban 
On all that stirs." 

The little Jersey lads and lasses, in late colonial and early 



438 The Story of an Old Faum. 

Revolutionary days, did not, in their Sabbath journeys, find their 
ways strfewn with flowers. There were no Sunday schools, no 
attractive Bible stories, no interesting library books. The joyous 
sound of childish voices was never heard in glad Sunday songs, for 
the " Old, old story " had not yet been told for them in tuneful 
verse. They had to content themselves with the Heidelberg 
and Westminster catechisms, and the same strong spiritual food 
as had their elders — largely composed of stern Calvinistic tenet 
and dogma. 

The Reverend Ashbel Green, in his autobiography, — though 
by no means intending so to do — has painted in sombre colors 
the strict and solemn manner in which, the Lord's day was 
observed under his paternal roof, about the time of which we are 
writing. His father was for forty-five years the Presbyterian 
clergyman at Hanover, near Morristown, where he died in 1790. 
This divine was equally learned in law, medicine, and theology, 
and also engaged largely 'in business enterprises. A letter was 
once addressed to him as " Preacher, Teacher, Doctor, Proctor, 
Miller, and Distiller." His gravestone records that he possessed 
'^ a genius, solid, inquisitive, and penetrating ; an industry, 
active and unwearied ; a learning, curious and accurate ; a man- 
ner, simple and reserved ; a piety, humble and enlightened." 
Doctor Ashbel Green tells that upon his father's family return- 
ing from church on Sunday, after listening to two long sermons, 
a short rest was taken, when the children with the mother were 
brought together for religious instruction and devotion. Each 
one was asked in regular order every question in the "West- 
minster Shorter Catechism," besides being expected to make 
remarks and explanations on the most important questions and 
answers. When this was finished, the children, of whom there 
were five or six, were questioned on five Bible chapters that had 
been given them during the week for study. This was suc- 
ceeded by their being asked as to the two texts of the day, and 
all that could be remembered of the sermons. This was followed 
by their repeating sentences of devotional poetry, and the telling 
of the religious reading they had had during the week, other 
than the Bible ; then came prayers and a pious address by the 
sire. 

By the time all this was over the day must have been well on 



Introduction of Sunday Schools. 439 

the wane, but still no relief from this religious strain came to the 
young people. Secular conversation of any kind was r^ot per- 
mitted, and no ordinary home subjects were ever broached by 
the family, excepting those relating to the evening milking, and 
the care of the horses and cattle. Shall we be charged with 
being hypercritical of such colorless Sundays, if we wonder 
whether the boys were not occasionally wicked enough to steal 
out behind the barn, and there give one long, low whistle, as a 
vent to suppressed vitality ? In the face of the reverend doc- 
tor's testimony we may not marvel at the story told of the little 
colonial maid, who interrupted the weekly catechetical inquisi- 
tion by asking if there were to be any Sundays in heaven ; and 
who, on being answered, " Yes, it will be all Sunday, one long 
saints' eternal rest," replied, "Well, then, father, do you know 
that I'd a heap liefer go to the other place." 

The weight of puritanical Sabbaths, which pressed so heavily 
on childish heads, was much lessened by the establishment of 
Sunday schools. Strange as it may appear, their introduction 
was strenuously opposed — not, as one might suppose, by the free- 
thinkers and the ungodly — but by members of orthodox churches, 
and even by ministers. As early as 1747 one was opened at 
Ephrata, Pennsylvania, by Ludwig Hacker, a Grerman Seventh- 
day Baptist ; this Was thirty-five years before the first one was 
instituted in England by Robert Raikes. Hacker's pioneer 
school stood alone in America until 1786, when one was estab- 
lished in Virginia They soon became numerous throughout 
the country as individual enterprises. It was not until 1809 
that their control began to be assumed by the churches. In that 
year the Reverend Mr. Steele, the pastor of the Presbyterian 
church at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, opened a school for Sunday 
teaching in the court-house on Market square in that city. It 
was under the care and direction of his congregation, and was 
supported with zeal and enthusiasm by some of the most influen- 
tial citizens. The first record I have found of a New Jersey 
Sunday school is of one founded by Jacob Day and Peter D. 
Vroom, afterwards governor of the state, in the congregation of 
the Presbyterian church at Hackettstown, on the fifth of May, 
1812. It is a singular circumstance that these two men should 
have both, after living most useful and honorable lives, died on 



440 The Story of an Old Farm. 

the same day in 1873. They out-lived nearly all of the thirty- 
four children who had constituted this first school that had been 
organized under their auspices. 

Among the earliest of the Sunday schools in New Jersey was 
one established in May, 1815, by the Reverend Burr Baldwin, 
in the old academy at Newark. The first in Trenton was formed 
in the winter of the same year. It was a joint enter jDrise of 
some young men connected with the Baptist, Methodist, Quaker 
and Presbyterian congregations, beginning in a room over the 
public market, with six teachers and twenty-six scholars. In 
three months the attendance had so increased as to result in each 
church carrying on its own school. Three years later a Sunday 
school was started by Miss Catharine Campbell in her father's 
house near Springfield, in Union county ; encouraged by its 
success, within a few months some ladies organized Sunday 
classes in connection with the Presbyterian church of that village. 
Its pastor, the Reverend W. Teller, is my authority for saying 
that this school had no men teachers, because the good brothers 
did not care to compromise their Christian standing until they 
were sure the new enterprise would be successful. Even at that 
late day many of the churches still looked with great suspicion 
on the Sunday schools, and not a few of the pastors thought there 
was much danger that such innovations would " draw away the 
general interest from the long established means of grace and 
methods of salvation." About the same time, or possibly in the 
preceding year, a Sunday school was started by the Presbyterian 
congregation of Madison, the movement having originated with 
Elder William Thompson, who had read a tract on the subject. 
The first teachers, however, were all women. The next school 
organized in New Jersey was by the Woodbridge Presbyterian 
church in 1819, under the pastorate of the Reverend Henry 
Mills. Here again we find that the teachers were all drawn from 
the women of the congregation. 

Aaron Malick during his life continued to be associated with 
the Lutheran church at New Germantown, but as his children 
grew to men's and women's estate they connected themselves 
with the Reformed Dutch church, with which congregation 
their Bedminster descendants have continued. Aaron seems 
also to have had the interest of this Dutch flock at heart, as is 



Doctor John Rodgeks at Lamington Church. 441 

shown by his having given his bond to aid it financially. He 
must have been a liberal Christian, and in sympathy with all 
denominations, as we find his name occasionally among the com- 
municants of the Bedminster Presbyterian church at Lamington. 
At the outset of the war this pulpit was occupied by the Rev- 
erend Jeremiah 'Halsey, who died in 1780. In March, 1781, 
the Reverend Doctor John Mason, of New York, became the 
supply of the Lamington congregation, and in May, 1782, the 
services of Doctor John Rodgers were secured, he remaining in 
charge until the peace in 1783, when he returned to the First 
Presbyterian church of New York city, which he served for 
forty-six years. Like his brother of the Dutch pulpit, he dealt 
telling blows from the sacred desk at tories as well as at unbe- 
lievers, and earned a national reputation as a patriotic clergy- 
man. His pronounced course in opposition to the Crown neces- 
sitated his leaving New Y^ork on the advent of the British, who 
converted his Wall street church into a barrack for troops. The 
condemnation of an enemy often rises superior to the best of 
praise. Judge Jones, in his " History of New York City," in 
his venomous tory way, thus describes Doctor Rodgers : 

An incendiary and a person of rigid republican principles, a rebellious, sedi- 
tious preacher, a man who had given more encouragement to rebellion by his 
treasonable harangues from the pulpit than any other republican preacher, per- 
haps, upon the continent. Being a minister he had free access to all the families 
of the Presbyterian persuasion, consequently opportunities for using his influence 
and doing a great deal of mischief. 

Judge Jones' description grossly misrepresents the character 
of this worthy man, for he possessed not only the faith and hope , 
but also the charity of a Christian. Amidst all the decision with 
which he thought, and the firmness with which he acted, during 
the struggle for independence, he was distinguished for his 
liberality toward those who adopted a different opinion or pursued 
an opposite course. In his judgment of others, as has been well 
said, he showed the liberality of a gentleman, not soured by that 
spirit which assails and sometimes subdues clerical men of great 
talent and worth. The Bedminster people grew warmly attached 
to this eminent divine whom the chances of war had exiled to 
their retired hill country. Elders of the last generation remem- 
bered him as a large man with an imposing presence j of courtly 



442 The Story of an Old Farm. 

and gentle manners, but uncompromising in the elucidation of 
his religious and political views. In making visits he wore his 
gown and bands on week days as on Sundays, and as he walked 
abroad, carrying a gold-headed cane, and arrayed in a buzz-wig, 
cocked hat, and silver knee and shoe buckles, presented a dis- 
tinguished and dignified appearance. It was not uncommon for 
ministers of that time to wear their gowns when out of the pul- 
pit. The Reverend John Witherspoon during the six years 
that he was a member of the United States congress always 
appeared in his seat in the house arrayed in full clerical robes. 

The Presbyterian heart has ever glowed warmly with a 
religious zeal, blended with an independent and anti-monarchical 
spirit ; this is especially true of Scotch covenanters and their 
descendants, by whom the early New Jersey churches were largely 
leavened. Such members of this communion from their earliest 
religious thinking had become imbued with the affinity existing 
between republican forms of government and that of their own 
church. They were also made well acquainted by their religious 
literature with the good policy and wisdom of a proper spirit of 
rebellion. Luther and Calvin were both rebels, and John Knox 
did not hesitate to tell Queen Mary that under some circum- 
stances subjects did not owe duty and obedience to their princes. 
A brave sentiment to utter at so dangerous a time. It is not 
strange, then, that persons bred in this faith, with characters 
dominated by virtue, courage, and an inflexible will born of the 
memories and traditions of persecutions, should have had in them 
the love of popular liberty, and, from the first dawn among 
the colonists of the feeling of resistance to oppression, have 
been in the van of the revolt against the king of England. 

Patriotism and Presbyterianism were closely allied throughout 
the entire Revolutionary contest. In that communion there were 
few loyalists, and both clergy and laity not only preached and 
talked against the surrendering of any of the privileges of free- 
men, but were ready to, and did, donate their property and lay 
down their lives to the end that the country they loved so well 
should be free and independent. On the seventeenth of May, 
1775, the synod, then sitting in Philadelphia, appointed Doctors 
Witherspoon and Rodgers and the Reverend James Caldwell — 
three prominent Revolutionary figures, two of whom we may 



Presbyterians During the Revolution. 443 

proudly claim as Jersejmen — as a committee to present to the 
churches an appeal on behalf of the country. Though ministers 
of the gospel of peace, these committeemen in their address 
deemed it their duty to take a firm stand on the side of war, 
should a continuation of hostilities be necessary to preserve the 
united interests of the colonies. They further urged upon the 
people the duty of aiding in the execution of the measm-es 
proposed by continental congress. From then until 1783, when 
the synod issued another pastoral letter, congratulating the peo- 
ple upon the happy termination of the war, both clergy and laity 
were marked as special objects for British and tory persecution. 

Where is the Jerseyraan of us all who can fail to have a real- 
izing sense of the debt owing to the Presbyterians of his state for 
their sufferings and sacrifices during the struggle with Britain f 
It was on the clergy that the direst evils fell, for with the death 
or running out of a " rebel pai'son" it was considered that one more 
of the seditious streams flowing from Presbyterian pulpits had 
been dammed. Among the ministers who fought with the army, 
or preached and prayed from dram-heads, stands conspicuously 
in the foreground, James (Caldwell, pastor of the Elizabethtown 
church. The sad story of his privations and death — and what 
was worse, the murder of his wife — need hardly be retold in these 
pages. 

" Why, he had 
All the Jerseys aflame. And they gave liim the name 
Of the " rebel high priest." He stuck in their gorge, 
For he loved the Lord God, and he hated King George. " 

His church was considered a hot-bed of rebellion, and its con- 
gregation has a distinguished Revolutionary record. In it were 
such sturdy patriots as Governor William Livingston ; Elias 
Boudinot, commissary-general of prisoners, president of congress 
-and first president of the American Bible Society ; Abraham 
Clark, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence ; 
Oenerals Elias and Jonathan Dayton ; Colonels Spencer and 
Barber ; and forty other commissioned officers, to say nothing of 
non-commissioned officers, privates and militia. In this connec- 
tion it is interesting to note that this is the oldest English speak- 
ing congregation in the state, organized probably previous to the 
summer of 1665, and, without doubt, antedating that of Newark 



444 The Story of an Old Farm. 

by two years. A majority of the first settlers came from New 
England and Long Island, and were of the congregational or 
independent communion. Such was the new church established 
in East Jersey, Presbyterianism not having yet been planted in 
the middle colonies. Up to 1709 the people of Elizabethtown 
had been of one mind as to religion, the affairs of the parish and 
the town being jointly discussed and settled at town-meeting. 
About this time a missionary of the church of England appeared 
in the settlement, and gathered about him a small following, 
which ultimately blossomed into St. John's Episcopal church. It 
was not until 1717 that the first church of Elizabethtown gave 
up its independence, and became connected with the Philadel- 
phia presbytery, a denominational body organized about 1705, 
and patterned after the Presbyterians of Scotland. 

Another clerical martyr for upholding his convictions with pen, 
tongue and sword was John Rosbrugh of Delaware Forks, the 
chaplain of the 3rd Battalion, Northampton, (Pa.), militia. Pie 
was captured at Trenton by a troop of horse on that January 
night when .Washington stole away from the banks of Assunpink 
creek, and was savagely butchered, though incapable of resist- 
ance. The ^' Pennsylvania Evening Post," in giving an account 
of the afi'air, states that the " damn'd rebel minister" — as his 
captors called him — after being thus massacred '^' was stripped 
naked, and in that condition left lying in an open field till taken 
up and buried by some of the inhabitants." One of his last let- 
ters to his wife, if not the last, is still in existence. It bears rfie 
superscription, " Mrs. Jean Rosbrugh, Delaware Forks," and is 
yellow, crumpled and much broken. In the following reproduc- 
tion the words within brackets supply the place of those wanting 
in the original : — 

[Monday] morning, 10 o'clock, at Bristol Ferry, Deoem[ber thirtieth, My 
dear wife, I] haven't a minute to tell you [that the] company are all well. We 
are going over to N[ew J erse]y you would think [it] strange to see your Hus- 
band, an old man, riding witli a french fusee slung at his back. This may be ye 
la[st] ye shall receive from your Husband. I have committed myself, you [and 
the dear ple]dges of our mutual love to God. As I am out of doore [I cannot] 
write more. I send my compliments to you and children [and all our] friends. 
Pray for us. From your loving Husband. Jno. Kosb[ruoh]. 

Very many of the Presbyterian clergy of New Jersey suffered 



Sufferings of the Presbytebian Clergy. 445 

cruelties because of their zeal. Azel Roe of Woodbridge, taken 
prisoner, was confined in a New York sugar-house. Nehemiah 
Greenman of Pittsgrove was obliged to hide in the woods to 
•escape the enemy ; Mr. Richards of Rahway also escaped cap- 
ture by flight, but Charles McKnight of Shrewsbury was not so 
fortunate •, he was wounded at Princeton, and afterwards was 
carried off, and treated with such brutalities by his captors as to 
result in his death. In fact, indignities of every kind were the 
portion of Presbyterian clergymen throughout the entire coun- 
try, as in them was supposed to be concentrated the very essence 
of rebellion. The continental army was sprinkled with ministers 
of this denomination ; many as chaplains, some as surgeons, 
while others did not hesitate to carry a musket in the ranks. 
New Jersey furnished its full quota of soldier-parsons. Caldwell 
and Rosbrugh of Trenton have already been mentioned. 
McWhorter of Newark for a time was chaplain of Knox's brig- 
ade; Rodgers of Lamington, early in the war, of Heath's brigade ; 
while Armstrong afterwards of Elizabethtown, preached, prayed, 
and marched with the one from Maryland. Ashbel Green, presi- 
dent of Princeton college, was in his youth an orderly sergeant in 
the militia ; Asa Hillyer of Orange acted as an assistant- 
surgeon, and so the list of clerics among the New Jersey Pres- 
byterians who preached to, or practiced with, the soldiers, 
the doctrine of being " faithful unto death," might be greatly 
extended. 

•Mentioning Aaron's having communed with Lamington Presby- 
terians recalls the fact that in the last century the partaking of 
this sacrament by that denomination was made a much greater 
occasion than it is at present. At Lamington it was the custom 
at such seasons to secure the assistance of another minister. 
The Friday preceding communion Sunday was observed as a 
fast, and the regular pastor preached in the church at twelve 
o'clock. On Saturday afternoon the visiting clergyman delivered 
a preparatory sermon. On Sunday morning came the action 
sermon, after which the ordinance was administered, often to 
five successive tables, long addresses being made at each. Then 
there was the usual half hour intermission, giving the people an 
opportunity for regaling themselves with cake and beer at the 
always well supplied stand of Betty McCoy. On Monday mom- 



446 The Story of ax Old Farm. 

ing at ten o'clock the visitor preached a farewell sermon, and 
thus ended the four days' services. 

Betty McCoy was an old Scotch woman, and a noted 
character in the congregation. She acted as a sort of pew- 
opener, church-cleaner, purveyor, and, at times, general 
exhorter. When not so occupied she was usually visiting 
and gossiping among the people of the neighborhood, by whom 
she was welcomed as a worthy creature for over one-third 
of a century. Many stories are told of the acidity of her tongue, 
of the innateness of her wit, the excellence of her appetite, 
and the fervor of her religion. Rumor has it, that at one time 
at Pluckamin she put to flight an entire troop of British horse, 
one of the men having endeavored to take from her a package 
of much cherished tea. 

There were other ways prevalent among Presbyterian con- 
gregations of the last century that would now excite surprise, if 
not reprehension. What would you think of an installation ball ? 
Whether such a custom was one more " honored in the breach 
than in the observance," 1 cannot say, but Doctor S. W. Board- 
man, in an address in 1887 at the Centennial of the Hackettstown 
Presbyterian Church, referred to an ancient custom of conclud- 
ing the installation services of a minister by giving a ball in the 
evening, at which the new pastor and his wife were expected to 
open the dance. Unless I am incorrectly informed, the descend- 
ants of a minister who occupied the Wethersfield, Connecti- 
cut, pulpit for about half a century, preserve the tickets .or 
invitations issued for the ball that was given in honor of his 
installation. Evidently in social customs this denomination was 
not in accord with the more severe views of their Reformed Dutch 
neighbors. Many pleasing pictures are fashioned in the mind 
by the contemplation of the days of long ago ; but here is one in 
which the lights seem harsh, the tones garish, and the colors 
inharmonious. It is not an agreeable vision, this, of the sedate 
brothers of the Presbyterian sessions and their wives, solemnly 
advancing and retreating, bowing and curtsying, scraping and 
tip-toeing, through the stately figures of a minuet, while younger 
and more frolicsome members of the communion cut .pigeon 
wings in contra-dances and reels ? We know that the good 
book says " Let them praise His name in the dance," and Eccle- 



The Minister Treats the Elders. 447 

siastes announces a season for everything, but these religious 
hops seem a\broad, rather than an evangelical, interpretation of 
the scriptures, and we can hardly agree with the early New Jer- 
sey disciples of John Knox in thinking that the installation of a 
new minister over a congregation was properly " a time to 
dance." 

Many other curious customs and observances connected with 
churches in Revolutionary days could be narrated. As is well 
known, the word temperance, as relating to drinking, was not 
yet coined, and it was considered that liquor was necessary to 
health. Ministers or laymen would swallow a glass of apple- 
jack as unhesitatingly as they would a piece of bread. The 
story is current in Bedminster that one Sunday a clergyman was 
sent to supply Lamington church, who preached an excellent 
sermon. On descending the pulpit stairs the elders gathered 
about him, and, as was customary, paid his fee in crisp half 
pound notes. "Gentlemen," said the minister, "will you walk 
out with me?" Whereupon, crossing the road they entered the 
tavern and ranging themselves in front of the bar all took a 
drink with the clergyman. He then handed the tavern-keeper 
a half pound note, saying " take your pay out of this bank note, 
I have just received it for preaching the sermon." They then 
all returned to the church and soon afterwards were engaged in 
the afternoon service. Later on there will be more to say 
regarding the drinking habits of our ancestors. 




CHAPTER XXX. 

JRevolutionary Events of 1777 and 1778 — Washington's Army 
at Camp Middlehrooh in the Winter and Spring of 1779 — 
Interesting Incidents of the Encampment. 

We are now nearing the close of the year 1778, and such of 
my readers as are martially inclined may join me in welcoming 
the return of the continental army to Somerset. Much has trans- 
pired since we bade good-bye to its oflficers and men on the banks 
of the Delaware. It is not needful to detail their varied experi- 
ences on the Brandy wine, at Germantown, at Valley Forge ; 
are they not written on the pages of many histories? Though 
Howe had gained two considerable victories in Pennsylvania, 
he had neither destroyed nor crippled Washington's army; and 
by his costly change of base had secured little else than comfort- 
able winter quarters in Philadelphia, — quarters which actually 
weakened and demoralized his command. It was the Americans 
who really reaped advantage from the Pennsylvania campaign of 
1777; it converted their raw force of citizen-soldiers into an 
effective army, and gave the country an increased confidence in 
its defenders. Even the veteran warriors of Eiu'ope expressed 
astonishment that Washington's crude levies had so soon been 
able to so successfully stand against the thoroughly disciplined 
English and German regulars. 

The Americans were not without other causes for satisfaction 
with the occurrences of the year 1777. Early in October more 
than one chaplain and clergyman was preaching in exultant 
tones from the words of Joel: — ''I will remove far off from you 
the northern army." This text tells the whole story ! A great 
shout of joy had gone up from the entire comitry when the 
wonderful news of Burgoyne's suri'ender came rolling down the 



The French Alliance. 449 

broad reaches of the upper Hudson — reverberated through the 
narrow defiles of the Highlands — and, sweeping on southward, 
carried an ecstacj of delight to the inhabitants of both banks of 
the river, while filling with confusion, and choking with anger, 
the British and tories in New York city. 

There are sombre shadows in the picture displayed by 
the next slide of the magic lantern of history. It is the vision 
of cold and hungry soldiers, shivering under tattered blankets in 
the rude huts of Valley Forge. But when the black clouds of 
adversity hung lowest over the American camp, almost obscuring 
hope, suddenly, amid the darkness, a bright light shot athwart the 
national heavens. Through the bleak forests on the banks of the 
Schuylkill rang paeans of rejoicing and thanksgiving, which found 
an echo in the loyal hearts of a happy people from New England 
to the Carolinas. "As cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good 
news from a far country." It was glad tidings from over the 
seas that so quickened with joy the patriot pulse. While the 
woods surrounding Washington's cantonment were still carpeted 
with snow, intelligence reached headquarters that on the sixth of 
February, 1778, a treaty of amity and commerce, and a defen- 
sive treaty of alliance, the essence of which was the absolute and 
unlimited independence of the United States, had been concluded 
with France. Great was the happiness of the American people 
when they learned, later, that the Catholic French, whose inter- 
ests it would seem should have fostered, and whose traditions 
have favored, the cause of monarchy and England, had agreed to 
furnish men and treasure to aid in establishing a Protestant 
republic on the western hemisphere. It was the beginning of 
the end ! The Revolution no longer partook of the character of a 
rebellion of rebels, but was to be recognized among the nations 
of the world as a great political movement, destined to be the 
agency for the cutting asunder of ancient bonds, and, probably, 
for the establishment of a powerful government. 

During the spring, General — now Sir William — Howe went 
home to explain as best he could the causes for the non-success 
of his campaigns since leaving Long Island. He was succeeded 
by Sir Henry Clinton. This general, not relishing the possible 
appearance of a French fleet at the capes of the Delaware, no 
longer felt his army to be secure in its comfortable quarters. By 
29 



450 The Stoky of as Old Farm. 

the fifth of June he had destroyed his out-works, and the British 
transports dropped down the river, having on board some of the 
German troops, the heavy baggage, a part of the cavalry, and a 
large contingent of loyalists. With the main army, Clinton 
evacuated the city on the eighteenth, taking up his line of march 
for New York, by way of Haddonfield, Mount Holly, AUentown, 
and Freehold. Morgan's riflemen were quickly hanging on his 
right flank, while Maxwell with the Jersey brigade, Dickinson 
with the Jersey militia, and Cadwalader with Pennsylvania 
volunteers, harrassed the left of his long line, which was so 
encumbered with wagons and bat-horses as to stretch, like a 
narrow, many-colored ribbon, over nearly twelve miles of country. 
With such an exposure the slowly moving column was fearfully 
galled, which, together with the intense heat, made this memor- 
able march across our state rank among the enemy's most unhap- 
py experiences of the war. It was not a march, but a retreat. 
With the thermometer marking ninety-two in the shade, and the 
men heavily accoutred, it is not strange that soon, covered with 
blood and dust, many of them, spent with exhaustion, fell by the 
way. 

The major part of the Americans crossed the Delaware at 
Coryell's ferry, and reached Hopewell, near Princeton, on the 
twenty-fourth of June, when Washington held a council of war 
with twelve general officers. His advisers were equally divided 
as to the wisdom of risking a general engagement. Whereupon, 
as usual, he reached his own conclusions — the residt being the 
battle of Monmouth on the twenty-eighth, which, to quote the 
chiers words, '' from an unfortunate and bad beginning turned 
out a glorious and happy day."* 

One of the most uni([ue spots on the entire American coast is 
that solitary outpost by the sounding sea which stands guard at 
the entrance to New York harbor — that spinal curvature of sand, 
bristling with stunted trees, which forms what sailor and fisher 
folk know as the Horseshoe cove. On the one side spreads the 



* At the Hopewell council Col. Hamilton was exceedingly indignant that so 
many of the officers should have opposed attacking the enemy in force. In a 
letter to Elias Boudinot, written a few days later, he says that their judgment 
" would have done honor to the most honorable society of midwives and to them 
only." 



The British Army at Sandy Hook. 451 

sheen and sparkle of the glistening bay, whose low murmuring 
waves lap its yellow strand, while seaward its dunes and beaches 
offer the first barrier to Atlantic billows, that have swept 
unchecked their imperious way for nearly three thousand miles. 
Between, are hummocks and swales of drifting sand, mostly cov- 
ered with a maze and tangle of sombre cedars and other ever- 
green trees, twisted, bent and scarified by many a weary gale. 
With the exception of a few buildings clustering about the 
government station and the railroad terminus, it is an uninhabited 
waste of desolate solitude, where the winds sadly sough through 
the dense undergrowth, and where the silence is otherwise 
unbroken save by the wailing of the surge, the cry of the sea- 
fowl, and the hum of the Jersey mosquito. 

On the second of July, 1778, the repose and silence of Sandy 
Hook was suddenly disturbed by the din of war. The seagulls 
and fishhawks, startled by the unusual sound of pibroch, bugle, 
and drum-rattle, deserted their accustomed haimts, and with loud 
screams sailed away over the bay to the mainland. On that day 
General Clinton's army, exhausted by the exploits and discom- 
fitures of the hot field of Monmouth, came pouring across the 
Shrewsbury river on a pontoon bridge which he had been two 
days in building. The line of retreat from Freehold was strewn 
with knapsacks, firelocks, and other implements of war, and with 
not a few dead men. This sandy neck was soon alive with 
troops and all the paraphernalia of a great body of soldiers. 
Amid the dark green of the thickets and undergrowth were to 
be seen the varied colors of scarlet, -blue, and other uniforms, 
and the glint and glitter of burnished arms. Massed on 
the shore, and at points where the open spaces in the woods 
were most frequent, were red ranks of British grenadiers, 
gaunt Scots in green and plaid, fierce-looking German yagers, 
white-wigged Hessians, and buff-breeched light dragoons. Inter- 
spersed among the long lines of baggage and artillery trains, 
which extended for several miles along the beach of the inner 
bay, were ambulances and country wagons laden with wounded 
and invalided men. 

This phenomenal spectacle was not confined to the land, for 
Lord Howe's fleet had most opportunely arrived from the Dela- 
ware. The Horseshoe presented a scene of naval pageantry 



452 The Story of an Old Farm. 

that in these piping times of peace would attract a great array 
of visitors. Anchored on its surface were innumerable transports, 
guarded by formidable men-of-war flying from their mizzens the 
royal cross of St. George. Passing and repassing between them 
and the shore were great numbers of large scows, long-boats and 
yawls, manned by British tars, busy in transporting to the ships 
the troops, baggage, artillery and tents of Clinton's army. Some 
of the wagons that had carried the baggage and wounded were 
burned near the water's edge ; their horses — that is, the sound 
ones — were made to swim to the ships, being towed behind the 
boats that transported the men. All useless and disabled horses 
were turned loose and chased back into the open country. vSev- 
eral days were occupied with the embarkation, during which 
time, had the Americans taken advantage of the opportunity, a 
deadly blow could with but little doubt have been dealt to the 
British army. After crossing the pontoon bridge some of the 
regiments were forced to march through the deep sands several 
miles to the light-house at the end of the Hook, and then, to 
reach the small boats the men were obliged to wade in the water 
over their knees. It was the sixth instant before the embarka- 
tion was completed, and the last of the fleet weighed anchor and 
set sail for New York. And so concluded a nearly two years' 
endeavor of a thoroughly equipped foreign host to subdue the 
Americans. Every effort made by the enemy to destroy the 
continental army had been defeated, and the object for which 
the British were contending was not one whit further advanced 
than when in the autumn of 1776 CornwaUis crossed the Hud- 
son and entered the Jerseys. 

After the battle of Monmouth, Washington, leaving Maxwell's 
brigade and Morgan's rangers to watch the enemy, marched 
his army to New Brunswick, where they arrived on Wednesday 
the second of July, and encamped on each side of the river. Col- 
onel John Laurens, of the general's staff, writing to his father on 
that day, dates his letter from " Headquarters on the lovely 
banks of the Raritan opposite New Brunswick." After describ- 
ing the recent battle, he goes on to say : — 

We are now arrived in a delightful country where we shall halt and refresh 
ourselves. Bathing in the Raritan and the good living of the country will 
speedily refresh us. I wish, my dear father, that you could ride along the banks 
of this delightful river. 



Celebrating the Fourth of July, 1778. 453 

After the intense heat and rapid marching of the previous ten 
days, this refreshing halt was a delightful experience for the 
army. The men were quick to take advantage of the proximity 
of the river to wash and cleanse themselves, they being con- 
ducted to bathe in squads by non-commissioned officers, who were 
directed to prevent their bathing in the heat of the day, or 
remaining too long in the water. As Saturday was the fourth of 
July, the commander-in-chief on Friday thus addressed the army 
in general orders : — 

Brunswick Landing, July 3, 1778 : To-morrow the anniversary of the Declara- 
tion of Independence will be celebrated by the firing of thirteen pieces of cannon, 
and a/ew de joie of the whole line * * * the soldiers are to adorn their hats 
with green boughs and to make the best appearance possible. A double allow- 
ance of rum will be served out. 

The festivities were not permitted to interfere with the trial of 
General Lee for his misconduct on the field of Monmouth. The 
court-martial, which had been organized two days before, had a 
sitting in the morning. In the afternoon the time was more 
agreeably occupied, as all the general officers, the colonels com- 
manding the brigades, the commissary, muster-master, and judge- 
advocate generals, with the surgeon-general of the hospital, were 
entertained at three o'clock by Washington at dinner. 

On Sunday morning the left of the front line broke camp and 
marched by way of Quibbletown, Scotch Plains, Springfield, 
Haickensack and Paramus to King's ferry, where the Hudson 
was crossed. On Monday the right of that line marched by tlie 
same route, and the next morning the third and last division 
followed. By the twentieth the entire army was east of the 
North river, headquarters being established at White Plains. 

It must not be forgotten that the purpose of this chapter was 
to again introduce the continental army into Somerset. It is 
quite time this was done. For the remainder of the season the 
activities of war centred in distant regions — mainly at Newport 
and Savannah. The lot of the force under Washington was one 
of comparative peace and comfort, owing to the inactivity of the 
British in their quarters on the island of Manhattan. Both offi- 
cers and men had been greatly encouraged by the retreat of the 
enemy across the state during the summer, and by the fact that 
Washington had remained master of the field at Monnioutii. 



454 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

They believed that to a large extent they had solved the art of 
war, they were fully imbued with the national spirit, and felt 
that the country was strong and its future assured by reason of 
the powerful alliance of France. 

At the end of November the commander-in-chief made his 
dispositions for the winter. Cantonments were established sur- 
rounding New York, and extending almost from the sound to the 
Delaware. Six brigades were quartered east of the Hudson. 
West of the river at Smith's Clove the North Carolina brigade 
was stationed to guard the Highlands, while to protect lower Jer- 
sey Maxwell's brigade was placed in the vicinity of Elizabeth- 
town. Early in December Washington came marching through 
Bedminster on his way to the old camp at Middlebrook heights. 
His force was composed of seven brigades of infantry, embracing 
the troops of Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland ; 
General Knox's artillery brigade, Lee's legion of light-horse and 
the life-guard. Again our township is to be enlivened by mili- 
tary scenes, and this time for no short season, for Knox halted 
his brigade at Pluckamin and there established his winter quar- 
ters. His artillery included a fine train taken with Burgoyne's 
army. These guns narrowly escaped recapture by the enemy 
when Washington's army crossed the North river at King's ferry 
on its way to New Jersey. Charles Inglis, the royalist rector of 
Trinity church, in a letter from New York in December, to 
J. Galloway of London — the backsliding patriot — says that Sir 
Henry Clinton having intelligence of the proposed crossing of the 
artillery, determined it should be intercepted. Several thousand 
men were embarked on vessels which sailed secretly up the Hud- 
son. They were two or three hours too late — the rear of the 
artillery column was just disappearing over the hills as the ves- 
sels stood up their final reach, abreast of King's ferry. This mis- 
carriage was greatly deplored by the enemy as they were con- 
fident of securing not only the guns, but all the heavy baggage 
of the army. 

Reader, if you purpose continuing in the company of the 
writer, you must follow the soldiers. As sure as sparks fly 
upward, so Sure will a small boy drop bat, top, or marble when 
he hears the music of a military band. It must be confessed that 
your scribe is in sympathy with that same small boy ; for he has 



Washington's Headquauteus at Somerville. 455 

ever been incapable of resisting the fascinations of the rythmic 
sway of marching columns, the glitter of drawn sabres that marks 
the undulating motion of a moving squadron of troopers. Wash- 
ington had left Paramus on the ninth of December, and his first 
communication from Middlebrook was dated on the twelfth. He 
had been strongly urged to turn over his command to Greene, 
and to winter, himself, in Philadelphia. In his zeal for the 
service he resisted the invitation, preferring the meagre and con- 
tracted quarters of camp to the conveniency and amusements of 
the capital, in order that the affairs and requirements of the army 
could receive his constant care and attention. The commander- 
in-chief, not being able to find a building in the vicinity of Bound 
Brook or Middlebrook ample enough for his purposes, established 
his headquarters at the Wallace house — then barely completed, 
and now owned by Mrs. Jane Meehan — located where the road 
from Somerville to Raritan crosses the track of the Central rail- 
road. Although at this time Bound Brook was an ancient village, 
it was nearly thirty years later before Somerville had an exis- 
tence. Besides the Wallace house and the Reformed Dutch 
parsonage that John Frelinghuysen built of Holland bricks, two 
other dwellings and a tavern on the site of the present Van 
Arsdale's hotel were the only buildings where now flourishes 
the capital of the county. 

Mrs. Washington joined her husband at the Wallace house, and 
this most honored of all Somerset's mansions opened its hospitable 
portals that winter and spring to many distinguished people. 
The daily dinner was an affair of cei'emony and importance, as, 
in addition to the visitors at headquarters, the company included 
a certain number of officers whom it was the general's habit to 
invite daily to dine. It was, of course, impossible that the comman- 
der-in-chief should be personally acquainted with all the officers 
of his army, his practice therefore, was to extend invitations 
through brigade orders. Often as many as thirty persons were 
entertained. Edward Everett Hale, in his recent biography of 
Washington, publishes a letter written by the general, from 
Camp Middlebrook, to a deputy quartermaster-general at Phila- 
delphia, from which we gain some idea of the extensive menage 
sustained in this Somerset house that winter. The letter ordered 
purchased for use at headquarters a dinner service of queensware. 



456 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Among the pieces enumerated as desired, were two large tureens, 
three dozen dishes, eight dozen shallow plates, and three dozen 
soup plates. Washington's letter further requested that there 
should be sent him " six tolerably genteel but not expensive can- 
dlesticks;" "as much fur as will edge a coat, waistcoat, and 
breaches ;" and "two pounds of starch." He also asked for a new 
hat, saying, "I do not wish by any means to be in the extreme 
of the fashion, either in the size or manner of cocking it." It 
would appear that our own state at this time could furnish hand- 
somer table appointments than could Philadelphia. The deputy 
quartermaster-general searched the Quaker city in vain for queens- 
ware ; but Lady Stirling came to the commander-in-chief's relief 
and informed him that — as she happened to know — such a service 
as he desired could be procured at New Brunswick. All this may be 
called trivial, it is true, but life is largely made up of trivialities, 
and these serve a pleasing purpose in illustrating certain phases 
in the undercurrents of Revolutionary camp life. They are inter- 
esting, too, as showing how this marvellous man, while bend- 
ing — or rather, standing erect — under the weight of the moment- 
ous aifairs of the country, could still find time to direct the minor 
details of household and personal concerns. 

Although the dinner, from force of circumstances, could not 
abound in superfluities, it was amply provided, and handsomely 
served. General and Mrs. Washington occupied seats at the 
side of the table, while the honors were performed by Colonel 
Hamilton or some other member of the military family. Prompt- 
ness was the rule at headquarter dinners. Washington never 
permitted that anyone should be waited for longer than five 
minutes, conceding that time for variance in watches. To guests 
arriving when the company was seated he would make some 
pleasant apology, a not uncommon one being, " Gentlemen, 1 
have a cook who never asks whether the company has come, 
but whether the hour has come." This was at least less dis- 
courteous than the practice of the celebrated Doctor Kichiner, 
the president of the "Eta Beta Pi" club of London, who, when 
frequently entertaining friends at dinner, invariably, five minutes 
after the hour had the front door locked, and the key placed by 
the side of his plate on the table. 

An officer, who was with the army that winter, has left a 



Camp Middlebrook in 1779. 457 

record of his impressions on the occasion of his enjoying the hos- 
pitalities of headquarters. He has much to say of the simple 
and modest deportment of his illustrious host, who, while con- 
versing affably with his guests, preserved a reserve amounting 
almost to a hauteur, and whose cheerful, open countenance, 
together with great dignity of manner, impressed each one pres- 
ent with a combined feeling of love, fear, and veneration. 
Washington treated all at the table with equal attention ; and 
when the cloth was removed, after a few parting glasses of wine, 
retired, leaving his guests to the courtesies of his staff-officers. 

The winter encampment at Middlebrook opened with a much 
happier outlook than had the one at Valley Forge, the year 
before. The embarrassments of this time, as shown by Wash- 
ington's correspondence with Governor Livingston, were the 
reductions of the battalions owing to expiration of time of ser- 
vice ; the difficulty of completing the quotas of reinforcements, 
because of the country's feeling too great a security after the 
success of the last campaign ; and the rapid decline of the cur- 
rency, which added greatly to the difficulties of the commissaries 
in their efforts to supply the needs of the soldiers. Notwith- 
standing all this, affairs were buoyant as compared with what 
they had been the previous year. The men were in excellent 
health and spirits ; their commander, in a letter to Lafayette, 
writes of them as being in better condition than they had ever 
been since the formation of the army. The weather was unusu- 
ally mild, and the spring came in early. There was no severe 
cold after the tenth of January and scarcely any frost, and by 
the first of April fruit trees were in bud, and vegetation began 
to appear. 

Surgeon Thacher, of Colonel Gibson's Virginia regiment, has 
depicted in his diary some interesting scenes and incidents con- 
nected with this winter's encampment. His command was 
attached to the division of Major-General Israel Putnam, which 
lay below Middlebrook heights, near Chimney Rock, about one 
mile from the present Bound Brook station, camping — as I am 
informed — on lands now owned by De Witt C. Mather. Other 
brigades occupied near-by and adjoining lands, about one hundred 
acres of which have recently been purchased by citizens of 
Bound Brook, and converted into public grounds, known as the. 



458 The Story of an Old Farm. 

*' Camp-field." At this point many interesting Revolutionary 
z'elics have been ploughed up by former owners of the land. 
Until within a few years numerous low mounds were to be seen, 
which when opened revealed large stones and brickbats — the 
remains of the foundations of chimneys and fire-places — plainly 
indicating the site of the log-cabins or huts in which the troops 
were quartered. These huts were constructed of dove-tailed 
tree-trunks, no nails or iron-work of any kind being used. The 
interstices between the logs were filled with clay, and the chim- 
neys, made of small sticks, were similarly plastered. The officers' 
huts were generally divid^ed in two apartments, for four occu- 
pants who comprised one mess, but the privates' and non-com- 
mission officers' huts had but one room, and contained ten or 
twelve straw-filled bunks for that number of men. Late in the 
autumn, Greneral Gates having been ordered to Boston, Putnam 
was sent to take his place in Hartford. This left the division 
under the command of its senior brigadier — Muhlenberg, our 
old friend, the Jersey parson. Thacher writes of liim as being 
corpulent and clumsy, but as '' brave as Caesar," and although 
exhibiting but few of the refinements of education, his bold and 
undaunted front and military carriage proclaimed the veteran 
soldier. He was a good liver and fond of entertaining his bro- 
ther officers. On New Year's day he gave a supper and dance, 
inviting many of the ladies of the neighborhood, and none of the 
company were permitted to retire before three o'clock in the 
morning. 

Somerset is peculiarly rich in Revolutionary houses. A nota- 
ble example is the one which was occupied that winter by General 
Greene, located midway between Bound Brook and Somerville 
on the banks of the Raritan, a short distance southwest of the 
Finderne railway-station. It was built by Derrick Van Veghten 
early in the last century, he having been born in 1699 in an 
adjoining stone house. This earlier structure was erected by 
his father, Michael, who, born in 1663, migrated from the upper 
Hudson, and was among the earliest of the Dutch pioneers in 
the Raritan valley. Although bearing many marks of age this 
dwelling's two solid storeys of Holland brick still press firmly 
and unimpaired upon their foundation, and its rooftree continues 
to cap a family homestead. A brigade was encamped on that 



Mus. Greene at the Van Veghten House. 459 

portion of the Van Veghten land forming the slope northeast of' 
and back from, the river, now known as the Shaw farm. Der- 
rick Van Veghten, who at this time was nearly eighty years of 
age, was very strong in his sympathy for the patriot cause, and did 
much to add to the comfort of the rank and file of the army, as 
well as of its officers. His homestead, which even then was a 
very old dwelling, was the centre of a bounteous hospitality. 

The hills of Somerset have echoed to the tread of many heroes. 
As has been before implied, few Revolutionary figures can be 
credited with the possession of more distinguished, attainments 
than can Nathanael Greene. What greater eulogy could a sol- 
dier desire than that spoken of this officer by Washington ? 
Here are his words : — 

There is no officer in the army more sincerely attached to the interests of his 
country tlian General Greene. Could he but promote these best interests in the 
character of a corporal, he would exchange, without a murmur, his epaulet for 
the knot. For, although he is not without ambition, that ambition has not for 
its object, the highest rank, so much as the greatest good. 

Greene at this time was acting as quartermaster-general, 
he having accepted the position in the previous March, in 
order to relieve that department and Washington from great 
embarrassments.* He had retained all his right of rank and 
pay as major-general in the line, and at the battle of Mon- 
mouth commanded the right wing of the army. In addi- 
tion to the official intercourse at the Van Veghten dwelling, 
made necessary by the occupancy of Greene, the presence of his 
lady proved a powerful attraction, and drew many to this old 
Dutch farm-house. Mrs. Greene was possessed of brilliant 
qualities, which earned for her high distinction and great influ- 
ence, her society and friendship being sought by the best people of 
the country. At this time she was about twenty-five years old, 
and is said to have been singularly lovely in person. Expressive 

*It was not long before quite a village of blacksmith's shops, store-houses, and 
other buildings connected with the quartermaster's department grew up on the 
main Karitan road at the crossing of the road running to the Raritan bridge 
{Finderne). The near-by elevation, even then known as Mount Pleasant, where 
is now the residence of John C. Shaw, was also in use at that time l)y the army 
for camping and other purposes. This was probably the location of Wayne's 
encampment in 1777 when he dated his letter to General Lincoln, from "Mount 
Pleasant.'' (See page 41 D.) 



460 The Story of an Old Farm. 

gray eyes lit up a fair face of regular and animated features. 
With a nature joyous and gay, her quickness of perception and 
unusually retentive memory combined in making her conversa- 
tion brilliant, and her society a delight to all who came within 
the magic of her presence. She was held in great esteem at 
headquarters. Long after the war, at the levees given by Mrs. 
Washington in Philadelphia as wife of the chief magistrate, it 
was the custom of the President to personally accompany the 
widows of Generals Greene and Montgomery to and from 
their carriages — a distinction which he conferred upon none other 
of the lady guests. 

The troops of General Wayne, which comprised the 1st, 2d, 
and 7th, Pennsylvania regiments, were encamped south of the 
Raritan, on a ridge of land west of the road running from Fin- 
derne station to Millstone, adjoining where is now the residence 
of D. R. Disborough. This general is often mentioned in 
Revolutionary annals as ''Mad Anthony," because of a bravery 
that was fearless of consequences. Somerset traditions, however, 
distinguish him as " Dandy Wayne," for the reason of his having 
been conspicuously handsome, with much magnetism and dash, 
and always uniformed and appointed with great care and fastidi- 
ousness. 




CHAPTER XXXI. 

The Artillery Park at Pluckamin — General and Mrs. Knox 
at the Van der Veer House — The French Alliance Fete 
— General Steuben at Bound JBrooJc. 

The corps of artillery commanded by General Knox lay, as 
has been said before, at Pluckamin. The guns were parked 
and the men's quarters were erected on the northwest side of the 
Cornelius Eoff farm, now owned by Nathan Compton, a piece 
of rising ground a short distance from the road, which displayed 
the camp to good advantage. A range of field-pieces, mortars, 
howitzers and heavy cannon formed the front line of a parallelo- 
gram, while flanking the remaining sides were huts for the offi- 
cers and privates, and other necessary buildings. Facing the 
parade, and standing on a slightly-elevated plateau, was a spacious 
and well-proportioned structure, capped with a small cupola. 
It was called the academy, and enclosed a room fifty feet by 
thirty, with an arched ceiling and plastered walls. Here from 
a low rostrum at one end of this room, the brigade preceptor 
delivered lectures on tactics, gunnery and other military sub- 
jects. It may be readily supposed that this capacious hall also 
furnished an agreeable rendezvous for the officers during the 
long evenings of that winter. Altogether, the encampment 
unfolded itself very attractively to an approaching visitor, and 
was in every respect a superior military village ; one of a no 
inconsiderable population, as the returns of the artillery corps at 
that time show its total effective strength to have been forty -nine 
companies, containing sixteen hundred and seven men. Had 
the companies been fuU the command would have numbered over 
one thousand more. 

Both officers and men of this artillery brigade wore uniform 



462 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

coats of black, turned up with red, jackets and breeches of white 
wool, and hats trimmed with yeUow. The adoption of this dress 
had created dissatisfaction among some of the commands, their 
officers being loth to abandon their former distinctive uniforms. 
Colonel Procter, whose batteries had marched with Washington 
since 1776, especially demurred against the men of his crack 
corps losing their individuality of dress, they, from the first, hav- 
ing well served their guns in blue coats faced with white and buff. 
Washington, however, wrote to President Reed, saying: — "As 
black and red have been pitched upon for that of the Continental 
artillery, it is unreasonable for him [Procter] to make objections 
to it ;" so of course the colonel was forced to succumb. 

In an earlier chapter mention was made that in the first years 
of the struggle Revolutionary soldiers were rarely arrayed in mar- 
tial attire. As the war progressed, and enlistments were made for 
longer terms, uniforms were adopted, and in other ways the regi- 
ments presented a much more soldierly appearance. One of the 
greatest 'offences against historical verity is the prevalent belief 
that the continental troops were uniformed in blue and buff. Such 
were the colors of the commander-in-chief, his staff, and of many 
of the generals, but the pi*evailing uniforms of the rank and file 
were brown, blue, and green, with trimmings of various hues. 
This popular but erroneous notion has been fostered by artists, 
who, in illustrating Revolutionary scenes, have pictured con- 
tinental soldiers clad in blue coats with buff facings, buff waist- 
coats and breeches, top boots, cocked hats, and ruffled shirts. 
This is false as to the dress of the men, and, often, also as to that 
of the officers; the latter, in the artillery, at least, were arrayed 
in the same colors as the privates. Interesting testimony in this 
regard is furnished by a letter written by Knox from Pluckamin, 
to his brother Peter, at Boston, on the thirteenth of January. 
The general says : — 

I have heard tliat tliere is plenty of black cloth in the state store of Massachu- 
sets, anil, to be sure, I belong to Massachusets. I therefore beg as you would wish 
the benedictions of the righteous that you would apply to said store for cloth 
enough to make a couple of coats for myself, and one for Maj. Shaw, [a staff- 
officer], we are both naked, therefore I pray you cloath us — and if they have 
white for waistcoats — don't forget that * * * I could not procure these 
articles under a small fortune here and yet they are absolutely necessary * * * 
don't forget the uniform buttons — and all the trimmings — were you to see my 
cloaths I think you would not think my request unreasonable. 



COXTINENJAL UNIFORMS IN 1779. 463 

Of the troops under Washington's immediate command at 
that time, some of them were uniformed as follows : — General 
Wayne's Pennsylvania division wore blue coats lined with white, 
ruffled shirts, red flannel leggings, and " a sort of cap dressed up 
with fur." Among other Pennsylvania regiments, the men of 
the 9th had brown coats faced with red, with red cuffs and 
capes, and cocked hats with white loopings ; the 11th Regiment, 
long blue coats faced with red and buff, and small round hats 
with black feathers. The 3rd Virginia regiment was uniformed 
in light drab coats with pale blue facings, green vests, and linen 
overalls ; the 6th Virginia wore black coats faced with red, 
white waistcoats, linen shirts and overalls ; while the coats of the 
13th Virginia were blue, cuffed and faced with yeUow. The 
5th Maryland regiment wore brown coats faced with red, spotted 
swanskin vests, oval brass buttons, brown broad-cloth breeches ; 
while the 6th was arrayed in gray coats faced with green. The 
prevailing uniform coat of the Jersey line was blue turned up 
with red ; — but enough of Pevolutionary dress has been given to 
show that the so-called continental garb had no place in 1779 in 
either the infantry or the artillery. As for the cavalry, Lee's 
legion wore cocked hats, and '^ green coatees," faced with white, 
their waistcoats were white and their breeches black. Colonel 
Moylan's 4th Regiment light dragoons, a command well-known 
in Somerset, though not with this year's encampment, wore green 
coats turned up with red, green cloaks with red capes, red 
waistcoats, buckskin breeches, and leather caps trimmed with 
bearskin. The artists, before mentioned, perhaps found their 
typical continental Soldiers in the men of Washington's life- 
guard ; they being near the person of the general wore uni- 
forms that in colors and distinctive features in many respects 
harmonized with his full dress, and that of his staff-officers. 

General Knox, together with his wife, quartered at the 
Jacobus Van der Veer house, on what is now the Ludlow farm, 
just below the Bedminster church. Time is a fell destroyer, 
but often does his work with slow and kindly hands. This 
ancient dwelling is still standing, and its hearthstone continues 
to centre and cement family ties. Although many of its old- 
time characteristics have been retained, it has been somewhat 
modernized, and few passers-by would suspect that it was 



464 The Story of an Old Farm. 

erected before the year 1760. During the winter and spring of 
1779 it was the most important house in the neighborhood, and 
the rallying point for both military and social affairs. Scores of 
people came and went each day, and if this old dwelling is ever 
in a retrospective mood it must look back upon those busy 
months as a very distinguished epoch in its existence. Knox 
was very popular in Somerset county, and old residents of the 
last generation delighted in anecdotes and reminiscences of his 
amiability and good fellowship. When stationed at Pluckamin 
he was about thirty-four years old, stout but active, possessed 
great intelligence, and had a most genial presence. He readily 
made warm attachments, and the villagers all looked upon him 
with great admiration. Tradition speaks of his walking about 
with a grand and self-complacent air, greeting in hearty tones 
those he knew, with a strong and decisive voice easily recog- 
nized as that of one accustomed to command. His large and 
full face was brightened by a covert smile, and on removing his 
hat a low, broad forehead was exposed, with short hair standing 
up in front but long and queued behind. 

Mrs. Knox, who shared with her husband the inconveniences 
and dangers of his campaigns, was nearly as well known as the 
general, and has been called the heroine of the Revolution. She 
was a woman possessing many graces of mind and person, and, 
though vivacious, preserved a most dignified address. Her 
imposing appearance, independence of spirit, amiability of 
character, and originality of mind made her a conspicuous 
figure in Revolutionary society. The following extract from 
a letter written by General Greene to his wife, on the twenty- 
third of the preceding June, would lead us to believe that cam- 
paigning agreed very well with both General Knox and his 
lady :— 

Mrs. Knox has been in Pliiladelphia and is now gone to Morristown. She is 
fatter tlian ever, which is a great mortification to her. The General is equally 
fat, and therefore one cannot laugh at the ot||er. They appear to be extrava- 
gantly fond of each other; and, I think, are perfectly happy. 

Mrs. Knox had many visitors, not only among the ladies of 
the near-by camps and surrounding country, but friends from a 
distance, who came for a more protracted stay. Two young 
ladies named Andrews arrived in January, Captain Lillie of 



Social Intercourse at Pluckamin Camp. 465 

the general's staff, meeting them at Elizabethtown, where, owing 
to the uncertainties of travel at that period, he was obliged to 
await their coming for a week. Miss Betsey and Miss Sallie 
Winslow of Boston also spent the winter at the Van der Veer 
house, remaining with Mrs. Knox till June. They were amiable 
and spirited girls, the elder one being the soul of the many camp 
entertainments occurring during the season. As to the younger 
sister. Major Shaw, another member of the general's military 
family, mentions her in a letter as a " lively little hussy," and 
thinks she ''will make a very fine woman." 

Social intercourse abounded in the military community of 
Pluckamin and its vicinity, and the officers often extended a 
generous hospitality to merry-makings at the artillery park. 
Major Shaw in a letter to General Knox's brother William, in 
Boston, on the twenty-fourth day of May, writes : — 

You know what an agreeable circle of ladies this state afforded two years ago 
— some of whom now and then kindly enquire — ' what lias become of Major 
Knox?' — it is since much enlarged, so that we can (in military stile) at a 
moment's warning parade a score or two. 

Kettle-drums, as well as drums contributing to the field-music 
of the army, were features of Pluckamin camp. It was the cus- 
tom of the officers occasionally to give in the academy afternoon 
receptions, when tea would be dispensed to the guests, followed 
in the evening by what they called a " social hop." The last 
affair of this kind was on the twenty-seventh of May, with which 
the ladies present expressed the highest satisfaction. An acci- 
dent occurred at its close which might have proved serious ; 
but I will let a witness — Major Shaw — give an account of the 
incident : — 

A clumsy gentleman in mounting a chair [or gig] after the Ball, to drive Miss 
Livingston and the amiable little Ricketts to our quarters, fell, like Phajton, 
head foremost from his seat, but, happily for him, the part striking being 
composed of solid materials prevented his receiving any injury. The horses 
starting at the same instant threw the little girl out also, with such vio- 
lence that had not Lillie, who was standing by her, fortunately caught her, she 
must have dashed to pieces. The shock was so violent that she fainted in his 
arms, but with some little assistance soon recovered. Don't you envy Lillie his 
happiness in saving such a cherub?^ I'm sure I did, as did, I believe, every one 
present. 

Captain Lillie, who so deftly stood between the cherubic 
^* Ricketts " and a dangerous fall, was born in Boston in 1753. 

30 



\ 



466 The Story of an Old Farm. 

He entered the army at the age of two and twenty as a lieute- 
nant of artillery, and at the close of the Revolution held a cap- 
tain's commission, and for several years had been an aide to 
General Knox. He served with distinction at the battles of 
Long Island and Trenton, and stood within a few feet of Mercer 
when he fell at Princeton. LiUie sustained himself well in the 
heat of the action on the Brandywine, and on that dark, dismal 
night at Paoli, when one hundred and fifty of Wayne's men were 
either killed, wounded, or made prisoners, with much address, 
through morasses and woods, he brought off his artillery in saf- 
ety. At Germantown he ably supported a soldier's character, 
and on the hot field of Monmouth overcame in single combat a 
sergeant of grenadiers, and bore him in, with his arms, a prisoner. 
This capable young officer was a conspicuous figure in Plucka- 
min during this winter of 1779, and was long pleasantly remem- 
bered. He died in 1801, while in command of the military post 
at West Point. 

By far the most notable social event in Somerset's Revolution- 
ary history, was the grand fete and ball given at Pluckamin on 
the eighteenth of February by the officers of the army, under the 
direction of Knox. That general, in a letter of the twenty- 
eighth of February, to his brother, wrote : — 

We had at the Park on the eighteenth a most genteel entertainment given by 
self and officers — everybody allows it to be the first of the kind ever exhibited 
in this state at least: we had above seventy ladies — all of the first ion in the 
state — we danced all night — between 3 and 400 gentlemen — an Elegant room — 
The Ilhiminuting, fire works, etc., were more than pretty. 

This celebration was in honor of the first anniversary of 
the French alliance ; it should properly have taken place 
on the sixth, but was deferred till so late a date because 
of Washington's absence in Philadelphia. The attendance com- 
prised all the army officers in that part of the country, 
prominent citizens and their families from this and adjoining 
states, and there were also present a great number of Jersey peo- 
ple as spectators. A large pavilion or temple was erected, one 
hundred feet long and of excellent proportions, showing thir- 
teen arches supported by columns, and illuminated with paint- 
ings and mottoes descriptive of the conception and progress of 
American liberty. 



The French Alliance Fete. 467 

The commander-in-chief, with his staff and escort, rode on the 
parade at three o'clock in the afternoon. He was soon followed 
by Mrs. Washington in a coach drawn by four horses, accom- 
panied by a gentleman of slender form, with a pleasant face and 
a dark complexion. This was Henry Laurens, a man of great 
wealth and social position in South Carolina, who had recently 
retired from the presidency of congress. The wheel of fortune 
was soon to make an unhappy revolution for this person. In the 
next year, while on his way to Holland as minister plenipotenti- 
ary from the new republic, his ship was overhauled by a Brit- 
ish cruiser ; he was carried prisoner to England and there 
thrown into London Tower, where he languished in close confine- 
ment for fifteen months. Another distinguished arrival at 
Pluckamin camp was William Duer, ex-member of congress from 
New York. It was a prospective alliance, rather than one 
already consummated, that attracted him to this fete ; for just 
then he was fathoming celestial harmonies, — being a willing cap- 
tive to the charms of Lady Kitty Stirling. 

The guests whom it was intended to especially honor having 
arrived, the celebration was inaugurated by the discharge of 
thirteen cannon, whereupon the assembled company sat down to 
a very fine dinner served in the academy. A writer of that 
time describes the room as being spacious, and recites further: — 

The tables were very prettily disposed both as to prospect and convenience. 
The festivities were universal, and the toasts were descriptive of the happy 
event which had given certainty to liberty, empire and inde[)endence. 

The rostrum, where usually the military lessons were given, 
served as a convenient orchestra-stand, from which the company 
were entertained with army music. A handsome exhibition of 
fireworks was given in the evening by Colonel Stevens of the 
artillery, after which came a grand ball, extending far into the 
night, the magnificence of which gave abundant topic for talk 
and reminiscence for that, and the succeeding, generation of 
Pluckamin folk. 

This dance, of course, took place in the academy. After the 
dining tables were removed, besides the space occupied by dow- 
agers, waU-flowers, and other on-lookers, there was left a 
" range for about thirty couples to foot it to no indifferent mea- 
sure." What a scene it must have presented for staid Plucka- 



468 The Story of an Old Farm. 

min ! Balls in the olden time lacked much of the hilarity and 
vivacity of the dances of to-day, but what they lost in the appar- 
ent gaiety of the occasion was more than compensated for by the 
picturesqueness of the costumes and by the stately grace and 
courtliness of the dancers. Scarlet coats, satin short-clothes, and 
striped waistcoats added much to the color and beauty of the 
scene, as their wearers stepped the stately minuet, or went down 
the middle in the popular contre-dance. No breathless couples 
whirled in the giddy waltz, nor went tearing across the room in 
the hoydenish galop. Over-heated girls, dishevelled locks, and 
torn dresses were not features of the hour, for dignity and 
decorum ruled supreme in all social festivals. The sobriety of 
this occasion, notwithstanding the joyousness of the event it 
celebrated, was, without doubt, enhanced by the presence of 
Washington. His personality always impressed others with a 
certain degree of veneration and awe, and even in times of festiv- 
ity his countenance, while benign, was said to be almost austere, 
and his manner uncommonly reserved. Thacher recounts that 
even his most intimate associates were never connected with him 
by the reciprocal ties of friendship, and but few could boast of 
having been with him on an easy and a familiar footing. 

Doctor Ashbel Greene, who, as chaplain of congress and pre- 
sident of Princeton college, made the acquaintance of all the 
leading Americans of that time, has left on record that he found 
in Washington more of that indefinable quality called presence, 
than in any other person he had ever known. The reverend 
doctor writes : — 

In his general manners he was eminently courteous and kind ; and yet, to the 
last I could never speak to him without feeling a degree of embarrassment such as 
I have never felt in the presence of any other man or woman with whom I 
was accjuainted. 

Robert Morris, of Philadelphia, though intimately asso- 
ciated with Washington, has acknowledged being always over- 
come in his company by a feeling of awe; and Lord Erskine, 
one of the greatest of English advocates, has expressed in the 
following language how he was impressed by the person and the 
character of this illustrious man: — 

I have a large acquaintance among the most valuable and exalted class of men ; 
but you are the only human being for whom I ever felt an awful reverence. 



Washington Opens the Ball. 469 

Mr. Lossing quotes the aged widow of Alexander Hamilton as 
having said that Washington never danced ; that though he fre- 
quently attended balls and assemblies, and always honored some 
lady with his hand, he merely walked through the figures. The 
general's evening dress is said to have been of black vel- 
vet, with knee and shoe buckles, a steel rapier, and his hair, 
thickly powdered, drawn back from the forehead, and gathered in 
a black silk bag adorned with a rosette. He opened the ball 
with Mrs. Knox. Cannot you see him, with his imperturbable 
face and kindly, grave mien, as, holding aloft his partner's hand, 
with all the graceful dignity of a nobleman of nature he steps 
with her down the room I Another partner of the commander- 
in-chief was a daughter of Judge Linn, and more than one beauty 
of that period, now sleeping under crumbling headstones in 
Pluckamin and other churchyards, was made happy, in after- 
years, by the remembrance that she danced that night with the 
" Father of his Country." 

The society reporter is not, as is so generally supposed, a 
modern feature of journalistic enterprise. He was an institution 
in the last century, and the one who figured among the guests at 
this Pluckamin fete was evidently not far behind his brothers of 
the modem press in liveliness of fancy. In the '^ Pennsylvania 
Packet," of the sixth of March, he describes Mrs. Greene, Mrs. 
Knox and the other ladies who surrounded Mrs. Washington, as 
being a '^ circle of brilliants, the least of which was more valua- 
ble than the stone which the King of Portugal received for his 
Brazilian possessions." I cannot refrain from giving a further 
extract from this Revolutionary " Jenkins's " account of the fes- 
tivities on this anniversary occasion. It is interesting as show- 
ing that in those patriotic days the afikirs of the country even 
gave color and direction to the pleasantries and ball-room 
badinage of young girls and gallants : — 

As it is too late in the day for me to follow the windings of a fiddle, I con- 
tented myself with the conversation of some one or other of the ladies during the 
interval of dancing. I was particularly amused with the lively sallies of a 
Miss * * *. Asking her if the roaring of the British lion in his late speech did 
not interrupt the spirit of the dance ; " Not at all," said she, " it rather enlivens, 
for I have heard that such animals always increase their howlings when most 
frightened. And do you not think," added she, " you who should know mere 
than young girls, that he has real cause of apprehension from the large arma 



470 The Story of an Old Farm. 

ments and honorable purpose of the Spaniard ?" " So," said I, " you suppose 
that the King of Spain acts in politics as the ladies do in affairs of love, smile in 
a man's face, while they are spreading out the net which is to entangle him for 
life." " At what season," replied the fair, with a glance of ineffable archness, 
" do men lose the power of paying such compliments ?" 

I do not recollect that I have ever been more pleased on any occasion, or in so 
large a company. There could not have been less than sixty ladies. Their 
charms were of that kind which give a proper determination to the spirits and 
permanency to the affections. More than once I imagined myself in a circle of 
Samnites, where beauty and fidelity were made subservient to the interest of the 
State, and reserved for such citizens as had distinguished themselves in battle. 
Is it that the women of Jersey by holding the space between two large cities 
have continued exempt from the corruptions of either, and preserved a purity of 
manners superior to both ? Or have I paid too great attention to their charms 
and too little to those imperfections which observers tell us are the natural 
growth of every soil ? 

General and Mrs. Knox tasted sorrow as well as pleasure, 
while living in the Van der Veer house. About twenty-five feet 
west of the Reformed Dutch church a tombstone is still to be 
seen, upon which is the following inscription : 

Under this stone are deposited the Remains of Julia Knox, an infant who 
died the second of July, 1779. She was the second daughter of Henry and Lucy 
Knox, of Boston, in New England. 

Mrs. Knox was, in all, the mother of ten children. Seven of 
them may be said to have been laid on the altar of her country, 
as that number died in infancy ; due without doubt to the 
excitements and severe bodily and mental strain incidental to 
campaigning. Bedminster traditions preserve an unhappy story 
connected with the death of this Revolutionary babe. Notwith- 
standing that Knox was in the township defending the homes 
and liberties of the people, the consistory of the Reformed Dutch 
church refused to allow this little one to be buried in the church- 
yard. In their ignorance and superstition the Dutch fathers 
considered the fact of Knox being a member of the Congrega- 
tional church of New England sufficient to warrant their refus- 
ing his child a sepulchre. 

The general's host, old Jacobus Van der Veer — himself one of 
the consistory — was very indignant at the stand taken by his co- 
trustees. He, poor man, had suffered from the same bigotry. A 
few years before, on the death of an insane daughter a burial 
place had been denied his child; this, too, in the face of the fact 
that the church-grounds had been a gift to the congregation from 



Steubex as a Disciplinarian. 471 

the man they were treating so harshly. The worthy elders rea- 
soned that the girl's infirmities would endanger her salvation in 
the next world, consequently her body in this one could not be 
permitted to crumble into dust among those of the elect. Van 
der Veer buried his daughter in a field just beyond the line of 
the " God's acre." He is said to have taken Knox by the hand, 
and leading him to the lonely grave outside the fence, ejaculated 
with a choking voice, " Gen'ral, this is my ground, bury your 
child here." The prejudice of the church people seems to have 
lessened, as a few years later the fence was moved, so that the 
burial-ground now includes the once excluded graves of the 
children of honest old Jacobus Van der Veer and the brave 
Revolutionary soldier. 

The winter and spring at the Pluckamin and Middlebrook 
camps were passed in perfecting the army in tactics and drill, 
under the able oversight of Inspector-General Steuben. At the 
latter cantonment the huts were erected in uniform and compact 
lines forming successive streets. For a considerable distance 
facing the front line the ground was cleared and smoothed, and 
freshly swept each morning, thus forming a fine parade for drills 
and inspections. Here the men were daily exercised in the 
manual of arms and the school of the company, and the regi- 
ments and brigades were frequently reviewed and inspected by 
General Steuben. This ofiicer was an enthusiastic soldier, and 
exceedingly diligent in his special department. At inspections it 
was his custom not only to rigidly scrutinize the bearing, uni- 
form and general appearance of each man, but to take in his 
hands the muskets and accoutrements, examining them to dis- 
cover, if possible, a speck of rust or defect in any part. Flints 
and cartridges were counted, knapsacks unslung, and every 
article spread on the soldiers' blankets to see if they contained 
all that had been furnished by congress. 

Major North, of Steuben's staff, recorded that he had seen the 
general and his assistants occupied for seven long hours while 
inspecting a brigade of three small regiments. Such thorough- 
ness was unknown in the continental army before the advent of 
Baron Steuben. He was at this time about fifty years old, of 
great dignity of deportment, rich and elegant in dress, and wore 
brilliant decorations. Doctor Ashbel Green, who, in his youth, 



472 The Story of an Old Farm. 

campaigned with the baron, said that his large size, strikingly- 
martial aspect, together with his handsome horse-trappings and 
enormous holsters, made him appear as a perfect personification 
of the " God of War." In the old country Steuben had been 
aide-de-camp to Frederic the Great ; of high rank in the ser- 
vice of the margrave of Baden, from whom he received the 
" Order of Fidelity ;" and grand marshal of the court of the 
prince of HohenzoUem-Heckingen, The king of Sardinia sought 
his services, and the emperor of Austria endeavored to attach him 
to his army. All of these brilliant positions, with their honors 
and emoluments, were sacrificed that he might fight for Ameri- 
can independence. There is no doubt that his primary motive 
for espousing the cause of the colonies was a desire to con- 
nect himself with a movement that he felt confident would 
offer a wide field for his military ambitions. But the baron had 
not long been allied with the continental army before he became 
imbued with the spirit animating its officers and men, and soon 
his deepest sympathies were aroused, and he became a patriot 
among patriots. On the thirteenth of July, 1783, he thus wrote 
to the officers of the New Jersey line : — 

A desire for fame was my ruling motive for visiting America, but when I saw 
so many brave, so many good, men, encountering every species of distress for the 
cause of their country, the course of my ambition vias changed, and my only wish 
Avas to be linked in the chain of friendship with those supporters of their coun- 
try, and to render that country which had given birth to so many patriots every 
service in ray power. 

On reaching the army at Valley Forge in 1778 Steuben was 
appointed inspector-general. From the outset of the war the 
troops had been in sore need of just such military knowledge as 
he was peculiarly fitted to impart, and they soon gave evidence 
by increased discipline and effectiveness, of his ability as a tacti- 
cian and disciplinarian. 

The baron made his headquarters, nearly a mile south of 
the Raritan, at a house located at the end of a shady lane run- 
ning from the New Brunswick road, then the residence of Abra- 
ham Staats, now owned and occupied by Cornelius W. La Tour- 
ette. Mrs. La Tourette is the granddaughter of its Revolution- 
ary owner. Since that time two wings have been added, but 
the central part of the house remains as it was during Steuben's 
occupancy. Its sloping roof, low eaves and shingled sides speak 



Steuben as a Disciplinarian. 



473 



of times long by -gone, but it is still modern in the sense of its 
picturesque homeliness being in full accord with its turfy setting 
and tree-embowered surroundings. 

It was dm'ing this spring that Steuben issued his famous 
"Regulations for the Infantry of the United States," but it is prob- 
able that the work was completed before he established himself at 
the Staats house. He first wrote the book in German, and, after 
translating it into incorrect French, turned it over to his staff- 
officers. Fleury then put it into good French, when it was again 
translated, this time into poor English by Duponceau. The book 
was then entirely rewritten in correct English by Captain Walker, 
and when completed, hardly a word of it could be read by its 
author. General Washington and his lady were frequent visitors 
at this old dwelling, and on several occasions it, together with the 
surrounding grounds, was the scene of elegant entertainments 
given by the baron, who greatly enjoyed playing the role of a 
beneficent host. At such times the banquet was spread in an 
adjacent grove. When Lossing was in Bound Brook, pre- 
paring his '* Field Notes " published in 1848, he found old resi- 
dents who well remembered the foreign appearance that the dig- 
nified officer presented, his magnificent apparel, and the splendor 
of the gold and diamond decorjftions he wore when in full dress. 




CHAPTER XXXII. 

Festivities and Ceremonies at Camp Middlehrooh — The French 
Minister, M. Gerard, and the Spanish Envoy, Don Juan de 
Miralles, Visit General Washington — The Grand Review in 
Their Honor. 

Numerous circumstances conspired to make the Middlebrook 
cantonment conspicuous for its agreeable features. There were 
few or no annoyances from the enemy, and, as has before been 
said, both officers and men of the continental force were in 
excellent temper. The hours of the army during this mild 
winter and spring were not all taken up with work and drills. 
The officers found time for social intercourse and festivities, 
such opportunities presenting themselves more readily because 
of a custom prevailing in the armies of the Revolution which 
had no existence in those of the late civil war. We have seen 
that the generals were often accompanied by their wives and 
families. This was an example that the junior officers were not 
loth to follow ; the result was a very respectable contingent of 
ladies' society in the vicinity of Middlebrook camp. In addi- 
tion, the young nation's defenders fraternized with the county 
families, so, altogether, there was no difficulty in securing a 
goodly assemblage at the frequent reunions and dances given by 
the officers. Mrs. Washington, Mrs. Knox, Mrs. Lott from near 
Morristown, and Lady Stirling and her daughter Kitty being 
within easy driving distance saw much of each other, and always 
took part in the social gatherings of the army. Greene, in a 
letter to Colonel Wadsworth on the nineteenth of March, thus 
-speaks of pleasant hours passed in the Van Veghten house : — 

We had a little dance at my quarters a few evening past. Upon the whole we 
Jhad a pretty little frisk. * * * Miss Cornelia Lott, and Miss Betsey Living- 



Cornelia Lott and Mrs. Greene. 475 

ston are with Mrs. Greene. This moment they have sent for me to drink tea. I 
must go. 

Cornelia Lott was the daughter of Abraham Lott, a prominent 
merchant who lived in handsome style at Beaverwyck, eight 
miles from Morristown. He was at the head of a cultivated 
household, and during the war his substantial mansion, from 
which he dispensed a generous hospitality, was frequently 
resorted to by officers of the army. One of his daughters mar- 
ried Captain Livingston, an aide-de-camp of Greene. The 
general's wife on the occasion of her first visit to New Jersey, 
in 1777, spent a portion of the summer with this family. Her 
husband in writing to her from Morristown, in May of that 
year, thus spoke of the household into which she was soon to be 
introduced : — 

Mr. Lott's household have engaged you to spend the summer there. They are 
one of the finest families you ever saw. The old gentleman and his lady are as 
merry as boys of fourteen ; there are four or five young ladies of delicate senti- 
ments and polite education. They are all anxious to see you, and cultivate your 
acquaintance. They long to see you, and impatiently wait your coming. Heaven 
grant it be speedy ! Mr. Hoffman and ladies of this place wish to see you, as do 
Lady Stirling and Lady Kitty, one of the finest young ladies I ever saw. But Mr. 
Lott claims the preference to your society. You may learn music and French, 
too, there. Adieu, my second self. 

Mrs. Greene and Cornelia Lott grew to be very fond of each 
other ; so great was their friendship that on the birth of Mrs. 
Greene's second daughter the child was named Cornelia Lott. 

Attached to the line and staff of the army were many brilliant 
young men. In Washington's immediate military family were 
Colonels Alexander Hamilton and Tench Tilghman, his two most 
trusted aides. The manners of the latter, who was at that time 
thirty-four years old, were distinctly those of one who had always 
moved in polite circles. He belonged to a distinguished Mary- 
land family, and was connected with the best people of that 
aristocratic province. At the outset of the Revolution his father 
adhered to the Crown, and Philemon, a younger brother, entered 
the British navy. But Tench was from the beginning a sturdy 
patriot, and in 1776 joined Washington's army as captain of a 
Pennsylvania company that had volunteered for one campaign. 
His handsome presence, bravery on the field, together with his 
personal merits and the high social position he was known to 
occupy, attracted the attention of his superiors, and at the expir- 



^76 The Story of an Old P^arm. 

ation of a short term of service he was invited to be a member 
of Washington's military family. Throughout .the war he con- 
tinued near the general's person as aide, secretary and confiden- 
tial friend, and stood by his side at Annapolis, when he delivered 
to congress his commission. 

Hamilton was a bright, particular star in that military firm a-, 
ment. Though then but two and twenty his dignity of charac- 
ter was such as to insure for him all the consideration due to one 
who had profited by the experiences of many years ; it is said 
that when he entered a room, notwithstanding his youth, it was 
apparent from the respectfid attention of the company that he 
was a distinguished person. Colonel Hamilton was slight in 
figure and of rather under size, but possessed a graceful car- 
riage and courtly manners, together with an air of much refine- 
ment. His cheeks were as rosy as a girl's, the color mantling a 
very fair complexion from which the powdered hair was rolled 
back and gathered in a club behind. On the first of March in 
1777, when barely twenty years old, he was appointed aide-de- 
camp to Washington, and, owing to his intelligence and sagacity, 
soon gained the full confidence of his chief, and was invited to 
assist in the planning for the concentration and arrangement of 
the new army then forming. As says Troup : — 

The pen of the army was held by Hamilton ; and for dignity of manner, pith 
of matter and eloquence of style General Washington's letters are unrivalled in 
military annals. 

Hamilton's amiability and agreeable presence inspired in all 
with whom he came in contact the most affectionate attachment. 
Campaigning brought him his faithfid wife, for it was while at 
headquarters the following winter that he met, and fell in love 
with, the charming daughter of General Philip Schuyler — but 
more of that hereafter. 

These two aides divided between them the honors of presiding 
at General Washington's table, and of generally acting as major- 
domos at headquarters. They must have added much to the 
pleasure of visitors, especially to those of the fair sex. Perhaps 
this may partly explain the fact of the Wallace house having 
entertained so many ladies that spring. There were several 
young ladies there from Virginia — a Miss Brown is also spoken 
of — and we know that Governor Livingston's two daughters. 



Captaix William Colfax. 477 

Katy and Betsy, as they were familiarly called, were Mrs. Wash- 
ington's frequent guests. The governor's eldest daughter, 
Sarah, who had for five years been the wife of John Jay — then 
president of congress — was also entertained. Mrs. Jay was both 
clever and beautiful, and considered a social star, not only in 
Philadelphia, but afterwards in Madrid and Paris, when she 
accompanied her distinguished husband to the courts of Spain 
and France. It is said that the brilliancy of her complexion 
gave rise to much speculation in Revolutionary society. Even 
Doctor Witherspoon, who admired her greatly, used playfully to 
express to Kitty Livingston his doubts as to the genuineness of 
her sister's coloring. The French minister went so far as to lay a 
wager with a certain Spanish don, whose acquaintance we shall 
shortly make, that Mrs. Jay's complexion was artificial. The 
gentleman from France acknowledged his error by paying the 
bet. 

Another young soldier at headquarters who contributed greatly 
to the social atmosphere of the army was William Colfax, an 
officer of Washington's body-guard. At the outset of the war, 
when but nineteen, he entered a Connecticut regiment, fought at 
Bunker Hill, and served until the peace, being three times wound- 
ed, once dangerously. He was transferred to the guard at Valley 
Forge in 1778. When at Middlebrook, his buoyant nature and 
engaging appearance won for him many friends. He had dark 
hair, always well powdered and wona in a queue, a clean shaven 
face, a clear, florid complexion, and beautiful blue eyes dancing 
with expression. Colfax was a personal favorite of Mrs. Wash- 
ington who presented him with a linen thread net for his queue, 
knit by her own hands, which is preserved by his descendants. As 
was the case with Hamilton, campaigning brought him his wife. 
Just above Pompton, in Bergen county, at the junction of the 
Wanaque and Hamburg roads, there is still standing a venerable 
frame dwelling, having a long, low roof which slopes almost to the 
ground in the rear. Its old-time accessories all speak of the last 
centuryj and here during the Revolution lived Casparus (Jasper) 
Schuyler, a cousin of General Philip Schuyler, and a grandson of 
Arent Schuyler who migrated from the Upper Hudson in 1710, 
and settled first at Pompton, where he acquired a thousand acres 
of land, and later at New Barbadoe's Neck on the Passaic river. 



478 The Story of an Old Farm. 

The continental officers, in their many marches between the Hud- 
son and the Delaware, were often hospitably entertained in this 
old Dutch mansion, and the younger men found the efforts of their 
host most ably seconded by his charming daughter, Hester. Her 
attractions made a deep impression upon the susceptibilities of 
young Colfax, who, soldier-like, lost no time in laying siege to her 
heart. We may presume her defences to have been weak for 
she soon made an unconditional surrender, and they celebrated 
together the advent of peace by getting married. Colfax settled 
at Pompton on land still in possession of his descendants, and on 
which he died at the age of eighty-two. In a little enclosure, but 
a few feet from the highway and a short distance from the pres- 
ent family mansion, he lies buried, the grave being marked with 
a white marble pyramid bearing the inscription, "General William 
Colfax, Captain of Washington's Life Guard." Throughout his 
life he continued to be interested in military affairs ; he served in 
the militia, and commanded a brigade in the war of 1812. His 
son, Schuyler, was the father of the late Schuyler Colfax. 

It was considered a great honor to belong to the life-guard of 
Washington. The men were selected with much care from the 
different regiments, all states being represented ; it was requisite 
that each member should be American born, of good moral char- 
acter, finely formed, from five feet eight inches to five feet ten 
inches in height, and from twenty to thirty years old. They 
were uniformed in blue coats faced with buff, red waistcoats, 
buckskin breeches, white body belts, and black felt cocked hats 
bound with white tape. This command was kept thoroughly 
drilled in all manner of infantry manoeuvres, that it might stand 
as a model for the army. While at Middlebrook it contained one 
himdred and eighty men, but at the end of this 3'^ear — 1779 — its 
number was increased to two hundred and fifty, and Colfax was 
given the command. A year later Washington reduced the 
guard to its original strength, and in 1783 sixty-four men com- 
prised the entire rank and tile.* 

The custom was to have the life-guard hutted adjacent to the 

*In that year the following privates were from New Jersey : — Jonathan Moore, 
Benjamin Eaton, Stephen Hettield, Lewis Campbell, Samuel Bailey, William 
Martin, Labau Landar, Robert Blair, Benjamin Bonnell, and John Fenton, 
drummer. 



Light Horse Harry Lee at Bound Brook. 479 

quarters of the coraraander-in-chief. Upon an alarm being given, 
the guard would at once take possession of headquarters and 
barricade the entrances ; then, all the windows being opened, five 
men would be placed at each one, where with guns loaded and. 
cocked they would remain until troops from the camp sur- 
rounded the house. Mrs. Washington in after years used to tell 
with much amusement how that often, on occasions of false alarms 
at night, she had been obliged to bury herself in the bed clothes 
in order to be protected from the winter winds, which swept 
through the open windows of her sleeping rooms while the 
soldiers stood guard. 

Perhaps one of the most popular men in the vicinity of Mid- 
dlebrook camp was a swarthy-faced, graceful youth of twenty- 
three — Henry Lee, afterwards the father of Robert E. Lee, who 
gave up his sword at Appomattox. A Virginiail by birth, he 
graduated at Princeton, and when only twenty was captain in the 
cavalry regiment which later came under the command of Col- 
onel Bland. He early attracted the attention of the commander- 
in-chief, who at the battle of Germantown selected his troop as 
a personal guard. Lee's mother is said to have been, when 
quite a young girl, the '' Lowland Beauty" who first taught the 
youthful heart of Washington to beat tumultuously with thoughts 
of love. As all natures are human it is not impossible that the 
elevation of the young cavalry officer can be attributed 
to the general's tender remembrances of this early associa- 
tion ; be this as it may, Lee's bravery and soldierly qualities soon 
won for him a majority, and he was given a separate command 
of three companies of light-horse. During the spring of 1779 
he was a frequent and welcome visitor at the old Van Veghten 
house, near by. When Mrs. Greene and the young Virginian 
first met in camp, their vivacious natures and merry hearts 
proved mutually attractive, and their acquaintance soon ripened 
into a friendship which lasted through life. It was at Mrs. 
Greene's home, beneath the shade of the palms and live-oaks of 
a Georgia sea-island, that Lee died in 1818, four years after her 
own death. And now for these many decades the two friends 
have lain side by side on this same island, in a little coquina- 
wallfed graveyard hidden in the depths of an olive grove and 
surrounded by tropical fruits and flowers. 



•480 The Story of an Old Farm. 

While at Camp Middlebrook Major Lee and several brother 
officers were quartered at " Phil's Hill," a large mansion still to 
be seen on an elevation north of the main road, just west of Mid- 
dlebrook stream — of late the property of John Herbert. It was 
then the hospitable dwelling of Philip Van Home, the father of 
five handsome and well-bred daughters who were the much 
admired toasts of both armies. Van Home, himself, as far as 
loyalty was concerned, seems to have been a suspicious char- 
acter, and at one time Washington contemplated his removal to 
New Brunswick. Indeed, he was arrested and put on his parole, 
but was permitted to remain at Middlebrook, where he and his 
bright-eyed girls continued to welcome alike friend and foe, and, 
it is said, were often enabled to be the means of mitigating the 
ferocities of war. The young ladies had their reward — they all 
obtained husbands. One of them married Colonel Stephen Moy- 
lan of the 4th Pennsylvania light dragoons, the fascinations of 
whose merry nature and fine appearance, the latter enhanced by 
his red waist -coat, buckskin breeches, bright green coat and 
bearskin hat, were too great for the Middlebrook beauty to with- 
stand. This dashing Irish colonel was the brother of the Roman 
Catholic bishop of Cork, and was the first president in America 
of the " Friendly Sons of St. Patrick." After the war he became 
distinguished as an old-school gentleman and a hospitable host. 
He, his wife and two daughters, one of whom inherited her 
mother's fascinations, drew many persons to their attractive 
home on the northeast corner of Walnut and Fourth streets in 
Philadelphia. 

The Middlebrook tavern, a short distance from the Van 
Home house, is another Somerset building that has a Revo- 
lutionary story to tell. When it was erected is not known, 
but it was certainly before the middle of the last century, as, you 
will remember, we found it here in 1752 when Johannes first 
rode down the great Raritan road on his way to the post-office. 
Its present occupant and owner is fully alive to its old-time asso- 
ciations, and is careful to preserve intact all that testifies of 
ancient days. In its quaint barroom many stabs made by Revo- 
lutionary bayonets are to be seen in the heavy beams of its low- 
studded ceiling. 

In reading the story of these stirring times, when thoughts of 



Colonel Scammel at Camp Middlebkook. 481 

war seemed paramount with all, it is noteworthy that the mider- 
currents of personal feelings, hopes, and sympathies flowed per- 
sistently on, as if peace and plenty, not war and want, were the 
portion of this generation. The great drama of the Revolution 
moved steadily forward, and its action was not marred by the 
fact of its actors, to some extent, being hampered and controlled 
by their individual interests. Some men, at least, at this time 
rose superior to individualism, and squared their conduct by the 
needs of their country. Among the young officers of Camp Mid- 
dlebrook there was a worthy example of this patriot class in Col- 
onel Alexander Scammel, who will be remembered as Sullivan's 
brigade-major at the time Lee was captured at Basking Ridge. 
He was now thirty-five years old, and in January of the previous 
year had been appointed by congress to succeed Colonel Picker- 
ing as adjutant-general of the army. He had a manly presence, 
standing six feet two in his stockings, and possessed a great 
heart, with warm affections. His was a nature that sternly real- 
ized that it was vitally essential to the complete development of 
the Revolutionary scheme that all individual and selfish ends 
should be put to one side if they conflicted with the advance- 
ment of the common cause. So it was that here at Middlebrook 
he laid down forever what had been, next to his country's good, 
the most cherished desire of his life. For several years he had 
corresponded with Miss Abigail Bishop of Mystic, Connecticut, 
to whom he was devotedly attached-^ and whom he had confid- 
ently expected to marry. But the war proved an obstacle ; the 
young lady would not marry a soldier, and, though the colonel 
wrote her many tender and appealing letters urging his suit, 
she firmly persisted in making the acceptance of his hand condi- 
tional upon his retiring from the army. Finally, despairing of 
inducing her to alter this resolution, he, after a great struggle, 
abandoned all thoughts of marriage. 

His correspondence from Middlebrook with her and her father 
plainly expressed the keen distress with which he faced the 
necessity of breaking the engagement. In a letter dated the 
thirteenth of April, to her father, he writes that, though her 
resolution made him very unhappy : — 

My fixed determination has bfeen ever since hostilities commenced to continue 
31 



482 The Story of an Old Farm. 

in the army so long as my bleeding country demanded my services, and to prefer 
my country's good to every self interested consideration. 

In another letter of the same month, this time to his brother, 
he says that the rupture with Miss Bishop will doom him to old 
bachelorism, but he comfortingly adds : — 

Let us establish our independence on a lasting and honorable foundation, and I 
shall be happy at all events. 

Poor Scammel ! He lived, loved, and died ! History has not 
honored this hero to the degree of his deserts. He made the 
sacrifice but did not live to enjoy the reward, or even to know 
that the reward was secured. Two years later, when in front of 
Yorktown, he commanded a light-infantry regiment, and while 
reconnoitering on the thirtieth of September was surprised by a 
party of the enemy's horse, and so wounded that he died on the 
sixth of October. 

Late in April army society was pleasantly agitated over the 
arrival at Middlebrook of the French minister, M. Gerard, and 
Don Juan de Miralles, a gentleman of distinction from Spain. 
They were met some distance from camp by General Washing- 
ton, who, accompanied by the life-guard and a cavalcade of 
prominent officers, escorted them in honor to headquarters. 
M. Gerard was already well known to the chief and to some 
of his generals, having been in the country since the preceding 
July. He was looked upon by all with peculiar interest — not to 
say affection — because of being the representative of the nation's 
valued allies, the French. His visit to camp was for the pur- 
pose of consulting with Washington respecting some concert of 
action between the French fleet and the American army. Minis- 
ter Gerard's impressions of the commander-in-chief, gained on 
this occasion, have been preserved. In a letter to Count de 
Vergennes, written from Middlebrook, in speaking of his many 
conversations with the general, he says : — 

It is impossible for me briefly to communicate the fund of intelligence which I 
have derived from liim ; * * * I will now say. only, that I have formed as 
high an opinion of the powers of his mind, his moderation, patriotism and hia 
virtues, as I had before from common report conceived of his military talents, 
and of the incalculable services he had rendered his country. 

Don Juan de Miralles was a recent arrival in America, and 
attracted much attention because of the element of uncertainty 



Distinguished Visitoes in Camp. 483 

that seemed to attach both to his mission and to himself. He was 
an unofficial Spanish agent who had been dispatched to the 
United States by the governor of Havana, in order to obtain 
information as to American affairs which would enable the 
Spaniards to reach a conclusion as to the propriety and wisdom 
of recognizing and aiding the new republic. He was supposed 
to be endeavoring to further these ends, but it was subsequently 
discovered that his personal sympathies ran counter to the attain- 
ment of such results. The envoy seems at this time to have 
created an excellent impression on Washington, who in a letter 
to the governor of Havana speaks of him in most favorable 
terms. Congress, while showing the envoy every consideration, 
appeared to be a little afraid of him, and, as he did not directly 
represent the Spanish court, was carefid to treat with him only 
in an unofficial capacity, and through the intervention of the 
French minister. Bancroft says that Don Juan really looked 
upon the United States as the natural enemy of his country ; 
and that, as he came here as a spy and an intriguer, congress 
displayed an unwise confidence in welcoming him as the repre- 
sentative of an intended ally. 

Spain was at this time coquetting with congress, and showed 
but little disposition to negotiate an alliance except on the basis 
of the exclusive right of navigating the Mississippi. She was 
also anxious that her right to conquer and retain Florida should 
be acknowledged. Though urged by France, she held back from 
entering into fraternal relations, while there was yet a prospect 
that by offering pecuniary assistance to our struggling country 
its legislators could be allured into concessions that would greatlv 
inure to the benefit of Spain. To the average American of a 
century ago the matter of controlling the commerce of the Mis- 
sissippi, or of claiming the territory beyond that stream, did not 
seem of much moment. This is evidenced by a letter of Gouver- 
neur Morris, who wrote at that time : '^ As to its navigation " — 
referring to the river — " everybody knows that the rapidity of 
its current will forever prevent ships from sailing up it." While 
members of congress from the middle and New England states 
considered the country lying east of the Mississippi quite ample 
enough for the needs of coming generations, southern members, 
fortunately, had some conception of the future value of the 



484 The Story of an Old Fa km. 

western territory and its mighty water-ways. Thus a congres- 
sional discussion was provoked, which continued until the pro- 
cession of events in Europe had forced Spain into an alliance 
with France. Our own country was then able to enjoy all the 
benefits of Spanish assistance without making those valuable 
concessions which had been demanded. 

The presence of these guests in camp added much to the 
social gaiety, and resulted in occasions of ceremony and pomp in 
which old Bound Brook witnessed scenes of military pageantry, 
that to its inhabitants of prosaic to-day would seem more than 
brilliant. A notable event of this character was the grand 
parade and review given on the second of May in honor of the 
European envoys. The peaceful spot of this review, with its 
quiet fields and hedges, gives now no signs of the bustle and 
activity witnessed over one hundred years ago. But traditions 
cluster thickly just here, and the journals of participants are at 
our command, so we need not rely entirely on imagination in 
picturing in vivid colors the scenes and incidents of this gala 
occasion. Great preparations had been made, and on the morn- 
ing of the review crowds of people gathered to enjoy the display. 
A decorated grand-stand had been erected in a large field, on 
which were seated Mrs Washington with two young lady visitors 
from Virginia, Mrs. Knox and Mrs. Greene, and we are free to 
conclude that, among others, the Stocktons had driven over from 
Princeton, the Livingstons and Clarks from Elizabethtown, the 
Stirling's from Basking Ridge, and the Lotts from Morristown 5 
for we are told that dignitaries and leading families arrived in 
carriages from all parts of the state. 

The local color and picturesqueness of the scene were not 
entirely contributed by flying banners, pacing sentinels, and 
imiformed ofticers hurrying here and there in their cftbrts to 
further the preparations of the commandant of the forces. The 
" quality " added not a little to the picture, for the age of fine 
dress had not yet gone out, and the line between the gentry and 
the masses was still strongly drawn by the apparel of their 
respective classes. Ladies at festive gatherings were decked in 
lofty, round hats with tall feathers, and wore satin petticoats, 
tafi'etas and brocades. Gentlemen of the old school still were 
crowned with full-bottomed wigs, though younger men, more 



The Grand Review at Bound Brook. 485 

in the mode, head their own or false hair drawn in a queue, 
stiffened with lard and powdered with flour. This custom 
provoked Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his " Discourses," to com- 
pare a man of fashion with a Cherokee Indian who daubs 
his face with red and yellow, saying, that on meeting, which- 
ever of them laughed first at the other's fashion was the 
barbarian. Neither had the stately courtesy of colonial days yet 
disappeared. In fancy we can see the Jersey gallant with his 
cocked hat under the arm of his varied-hued coat, in knee 
breeches, striped silk stockings, and pointed buckled shoes, bow- 
ing low by the open door of the lumbering vehicle of that time, 
and with grace and ceremony handing its fair occupant to a 
seat on the reviewing stage. The lady, before seating herself, 
salutes the gentleman with a very low, well-poised and stately 
curtsy ; whereupon, the gallant, as was the custom with the 
polite man of that day, not only raises his heavily-laced cocked 
hat and bows low, but waves his leg and scrapes the floor with 
his foot. 

Let us, in imagination, mount the grand-stand and witness 
with the expectant throng the approaching display. And now, 
salvos of artillery announce the arrival of the generals and their 
distinguished guests. They enter the field splendidly mounted, 
forming a brilliant cavalcade. In the advance is Major Lee — 
brave ''Light-Horse Harry," the pet of the army — with his 
legion of graceful Virginians clad in green and white. Superbly 
horsed, gay with nodding plumes, and noisy with clanking sabres, 
champing bits and jangling spurs they prance proudly by, mak- 
ing way for the commander-in-chief, on whom all eyes are 
turned. Washington at this time is forty-seven years old, calm 
and dignified in countenance, of stately presence, and of noble 
bearing. Uniformed in blue and buff, with epaulets of bullion, 
varnished boots, ivory-hilted short-sword, and a three-cornered 
hat with a black cockade, he sits his bright bay with the grace 
of a perfect horseman, his martial and beloved appearance filling 
with delight the eye of every beholder. 

Then come the generals, their staffs and orderlies, and the 
foreign guests. Among them — Greene, not yet thirty-seven, tall 
and manly, with a face of singular intelligence; big-bodied, big- 
hearted, merry -eyed Knox, on whom all look with favor ;, 



486 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Muhlenberg, the fighting parson, rolling in his saddle ; Wayne, 
soon at Stony Point to dictate one of the most brilliant pages of 
American history ; Steuben, looking every inch the soldier ; and 
the slender and erect Colonel Hamilton, with his distinguished 
presence and aristocratic bearing. In their midst rides the 
courtly Don Juan, in his suit of crimson and aiguilette of gold, 
and the French minister, in an embroidered coat rich with 
jewels and foreign decorations. On they come ! — amid the rat- 
ta-ta of snare-drum, the bum-bum of bass, the shrill cry of fife, 
and the blare of trumpet ! On they go ! — past the grand-stand 
— flashing in the bright Bun-light with all the pomp of military 
trappings, and the glint of gold, silver and steel. 

Meanwhile, tht3 infantry and artillery, having taken possession 
of the spacious field, are formed on its two sides, the regiments 
in line of masses, in column by divisions. The commander-in- 
chief, with his general officers and the foreign envoys, passes in 
front of the troops, from right to left, in review, receiving the 
drum-ruffles and military honors due his rank. The generals 
then dismount at the grand-stand, and Avitness with their ladies and 
guests the evolutions and field manoeuvres of the army, together 
with musketry and cannon-firing. This being concluded the 
ceremonies and business of the day are finished by the troops 
passing the reviewing-stand, paying the marching salute. 

At the sound of a bugle the line wheels into column, and the 
men come swinging down the left of the parade, in cadenced step, 
their burnished arms shining in the sun. On reaching the color- 
marker they change direction, bring their guns to a carry — and 
now, with pennons fluttering and flags waving, the battalions go 
sweeping by, in division fronts and quick time, each officer 
saluting, and each soldier bearing himself as if proudly conscious 
of being under the eye of the commander. What wonder that 
the air is rent with acclamations ! that cheer after cheer rises from 
the throats of the vast concourse of spectators ! Here in these 
patriotic ranks are men who shivered on that bitter December 
night of the affair at Trenton ; who bled on the banks of the 
Brandy wine; who fought desperately in the fogs of Germantown ; 
who suffered with hunger and cold at Valley Forge; and who 
thirsted through the intense heat of the bloody field of Monmouth. 
From Washington down to the smallest man in the rear rank of 



Steuben's Banquet Under the Trees. 487 

the last platoon of the extreme left of the column, — what a con- 
gregation of heroes ! It seems to me, did I own the historic field 
of this review it would be prized beyond all earthly possessions, 
and my last injunctions to those that are to follow would be; — Sell 
all that you have! but do not part with the land that has trembled 
under the tread of the illustrious Washington, his generals, and 
the continental army ! 

The review being over, the generals, their staffs, and the dis- 
tinguished guests remounted their horses and left the field. 
Being joined by some of the regimental colonels — making a 
party of sixty in all — they rode through the village, and clatter- 
ing over the Raritan bridge soon turned down a grassy lane and 
drew rein in front of Steuben's quarters at the Staats house, 
where, spread in a marquee under the trees, a bountiful repast 
was in waiting. Although Washington was present, the enter- 
tainment was intended to especially honor the French minister 
who was warmly attached to the baron, their friendship having 
begun in Europe. Steuben was a genial host, his wit and pleas- 
antry making him a great favorite in all social circles. On this 
occasion he was ably assisted in entertaining his guests by the 
group of clever young men forming his military family. Among 
them was Captain Peter S. Duponceau, a jovial French lad only 
nineteen years old, who was always ready to frolic and laugh. 
He came from France as the baron's secretary, and he must have 
brought with him abundance of Gallic assurance, for, on landing 
at Portsmouth, he celebrated his arrival in this country by kiss- 
ing the first pretty girl he met on the street. Duponceau after 
the war became prominent as a lawyer in Philadelphia, where he 
died at the age of eighty-four, much venerated for his learning 
and distinguished as a linguist and philologist. Another of Steu- 
ben's young men was Captain Benjamin Walker, then about 
twenty-five, who, owing to his being an excellent tactician and 
thorouglily conversant with French, had been transferred from 
the 2d New York regiment to the staff as assistant-inspector. 
He afterwards became a valued member of Washington's mili- 
tary family. 

Probably no one present at the banquet under the trees on 
this May-day did more to promote the merriment and hilarity of 
the company than Steuben's aide-de-camp, Captain James Fair- 



488 The Story of an Old Farm. 

lie, a youth of twenty-one. He was commissioned an ensign in 
a New York regiment, and distinguished himself at the capture 
of Burgoyne's army. His amiability and wit always enlivened 
any society in which he was thrown, and it is said that even the 
taciturn Washington was not proof against his drolleries. Irving 
tells that once when the commander-in-chief was sailing with 
some officers on the Hudson he was so overcome by one of Fair- 
lie's stories that he fell back in the boat in a paroxysm of laugh- 
ter. No mention of the men who at this time surrounded the 
inspector-general would be complete without speaking of his 
favorite aide-de-camp, William North, whom he loved like a son. 
In the introduction of the baron's system of discipline into the 
continental army North rendered most efficient aid, and the 
friendship of these two men continued until Steuben's death, 
when he made his former staff-officer heir to half his fortune. 

On the fourteenth of the same month there was another 
parade and review, Avith its attendant ceremonies. This time it 
was not in honor of representatives of the civilized courts of 
Europe, — but of the savage and untutored sons of the forest, to 
whom the authorities deemed it good policy to pay some atten- 
tion and courtesy. General Washington was mounted on a fine 
gray horse, and, in addition to his customary retinue, was 
foUoAved by his servant "Bill."* As the cortege passed in front of 
the line, and received the salute, it was accompanied by a band 
of Indians, mounted on mean horses without saddles, some of 
them with old ropes and straps for bridles. The faces of the red 
men were painted, they wore dirty blankets, tufts of hair were 
their only head covering, and from their ears and noses barbaric 
jewels were suspended. Altogether, as a witness has recorded, 
" they exhibited a novel and truly disgusting spectacle." 

The reverse of the medal ! It was not all pride, pomp, and 

*The full name of this faithful attendant was William Lee. He was a mulatto 
slave, large, pompous, and alert, and before the war acted as Washington's hunts- 
man with tlie Fairfax county hounds. As long as his master lived, he remained 
near his person and considered himself only second in importance. He made the 
general laugh in the lieat of the action at Monmouth, l)y incontinently fleeing on 
the near approach of a British cannon-ball, after having marshalled into line of 
battle a lot of the officers' valete. Wasliington's will gave him his freedom, but 
he remained at Mount Vernon until his death, wliicli occurred many years after 
that of his master. 



An Execution at Camp Middlebrook. 489 

parade at the Middlebrook camp. On the twentieth of April a 
great assemblage of people and a detachment of troops sur- 
rounded an open space, wherein five soldiers sat on their coffins 
with halters around their necks, under a gallows. They were 
condemned to an ignominious death for desertion, and for a crime 
that the commander-in-chief always found it hard to forgive, 
that of robbing the inhabitants. With their open graves in full 
view, and while standing under the beam of death awaiting the 
final preliminaries preceding their plunge into eternity, three of 
them received a pardon, and were conducted from the gallows 
more dead than alive ; the other two were obliged to submit to 
their fate. Thacher, in his journal, records that the scene was 
particularly distressing, owing to one of the condemned being 
accompanied and supported at the fatal moment by an affection- 
ate and sympathizing brother. '^ They repeatedly kissed and 
embraced each other, and would not be separated till the execu- 
tioner was obliged to perform his duty, when, with a flood of 
tears, and mournful lamentations, they bade each other an 
eternal adieu, — the criminal, trembling under the horrors of an 
untimely and disgraceful death, — and the brother, overwhelmed 
with sorrow and anguish for one he held most dear." 

The presence of an occupying army in the community must of 
necessity entail upon the inhabitants much inconvenience, and 
often distress and loss. It was Washington's endeavor to protect 
the people of Somerset from all unlawful and marauding acts of 
the more disorderly element in his army. Thieving and the 
destruction of property at all times met with condign punishment. 
The citizens were very grateful to the commander-in-chief for 
his care and protection of their interests. On the first of June 
Domine Hardenbergh, on behalf of the consistories and people of 
his several congregations, addressed a long letter to General 
Washington expressing the grateful sense of the community for 
his own and his officers' vigilance in maintaining strict discipline 
throughout the army, whereby the good people of the neighbor- 
hood had been protected in their persons and property, and their 
calamities sensibly relieved On the next day Washington made 
the following courtly answer: — 

To the Minister, Elders and Deacons of the Reformed Dutch Church of Raritan : 

Camp Middlebrook, June 2, 1779. 
Gentlemen: — To meet the approbation of good men cannot but be agreeable. 



490 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Your affectionate expressions make it more so. In quartering an army, and in 
supplying its wants, distress and inconvenience will often occur to the citizen. I 
feel myself happy in the consciousness that these have been strictly limited by 
necessity, and your opinion of ray attention to the rights of my fellow citizens; I 
thank you, Gentlemen, sincerely, for the sense you entertain of the conduct of 
the army, and for the interest you take in my welfare. I trust the goodness of 
the cause, and the exertion of the people under Divine protection, will give us that 
honorable peace for which we are contending. Suffer me, Gentlemen, to wish the 
Keformed Church at Raritan, a long continuance of its present Minister and Con- 
sistory, and all the blessings which flow from piety and religion. 

I am, etc., 

Geo. Washington. 

It was here at Middlebrook that Washington completed his 
plans for an active camjjaign against the northern Indians. 
The expedition, which was placed under the command of Sulli- 
van, had for its object the chastisement of the natives for the 
atrocities committed in Pennsylvania, and the destruction of the 
cohesive power of the confederated Six Nations in order to 
weaken the value of the Indians as English allies. The troops 
employed by Sullivan were the brigades of Clinton, Poor, Max- 
well and Hand, and some independent companies, together with 
a park of artillery under Colonel Procter. Clinton's brigade 
was already at Canojoharie, ready to form a jimction with the 
main body when it reached the Susquehanna. Maxwell's force, 
as has been said before, lay at Elizabethtown. His Jersey sol- 
diers had not enjoyed that winter the rest and quiet experienced 
by the men of the Middlebrook cantonment. On the night of the 
twenty-fourth of February the enemy attempted the capture of 
the entire brigade. The British Colonel Sterling, with the 33d 
and 42d Regiments and a light company of the guards, embarked 
from Long Lsland at Red Hook at nine o'clock and crossed to 
Bergen Neck. The troops then marched to Newark bay, where 
the boats," which had passed silently through the Kills, again 
took them on board and landed them on the Newark meadows. 

Colonel Sterling pushed to the rear of Elizabethtown, intend- 
ing to guard all the roads leading from the place, and then to 
move in force on the Americans. Before his dispositions were 
completed Maxwell learned of the approach of the king's troops, 
and hastily retreated by way of the Rahway road, the only one 
unguarded. The enemy dashed into the town to find that their 
game had escaped. They remained there the greater part of 



Sullivan's Indian Campaign. 491 

the night, burning the barracks and storehouses and Stephen 
Crane's ferry-house. On returning to their boats they were 
more or less cut up by cannon and musketry, several men being 
killed and forty wounded. 

Marching orders for the Indian expedition were received by 
Maxwell at Elizabethtown early in May. Attached to his bri- 
gade, besides the three Jersey regiments under colonels Ogden, 
Shrieve, and Dayton, were Colonel Spencer's regiment, together 
with sixty-eight men from colonel Baldwin's regiment, and 
seventy-five of Colonel Sheldon's light dragoons, making a total 
brigade strength of one hundred and eleven officers and twelve 
hundred and ninety-four men. Lieutenant Colonel Barber of 
the 3d New Jersey regiment was made Sullivan's chief of staff, 
and Captain Aaron Ogden of the 1st Regiment was detailed as aide 
to General Maxwell. Of Colonel Barber we shall learn much 
hereafter. Captain Ogden was a gallant officer, who not only 
served with distinction in the line but on several occasions was 
a member of the military families of Generals Stirling and Max- 
well. He commanded a light-infantry company in Lafayette's 
corps at Yorktown, and after the war was a United States sena- 
tor, and the governor of New Jersey. 

This Indian campaign came at a very inopportune time for 
the officers of the Jersey brigade, they being just then 
indignantly dissatisfied with the authorities for making no reply 
to their petition for relief, which had been submitted to the 
legislature on the seventeenth of April. The pecuniary dis- 
tress of both officers and men was great, for not only had their 
pay long been in arrears, but when paid, owing to depreciation, 
that of a colonel would not supply his horse with oats, and the 
four months pay of an enlisted man was only enough to furnish 
his family with a single bushel of wheat. Notwithstanding this 
discontent immediate steps were taken to put the difi*erent com- 
mands in a condition for marching ; but, fortunately, before break- 
ing camp the anxieties of both officers and men were relieved by 
the former receiving two hundred dollars, and the men forty dol- 
lars, each. On the eleventh of May, the 1st Regiment took up its 
line of march from Elizabethtown to Easton, which point Sullivan 
reached on the nineteenth. The 3d Regiment arrived at Easton 
on the twenty-sixth, and Colonel Shrieve's regiment, the 2d, left 



492 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Elizabeth town on the twenty-uinth, marching to Easton by way of 
the forks of the Raritan, and Pittstown. The officers before 
their departure were entertained by the citizens who also formed a 
cavalcade and escorted the regiment from the village. We may 
imagine that the men of this command, as they marched along the 
Raritan road through Middlebrook, received warm greetings from 
their comrades of the continental army, who doubtless envied 
them the prospective excitements of an active campaign through 
a new country. Returning from the expedition the Jersey bri- 
gade crossed the Delaware on the twenth -sixth of October, camp- 
ing the next night at Oxford, marching thence by way of Sussex 
Court-house, Pompton, Morristown and Springfield, to Scotch. 
Plains, which place was reached on the fifth of November. This 
expedition against the Indians was in every respect successful. 
The little army penetrated to the heart of the Seneca country, deso- 
lating the lands and homes of the Six Nations of the North, burn- 
ing forty of their towns, and destroying over one hundred and 
sixty thousand bushels of corn. During the campaign but forty- 
two men were killed or iied, though but three hundred horses^ 
returned out of fourteen hundred that had started on the expe- 
dition. 

The Somerset encampment did not break up till June and 
July, when the troops marched northeasterly over the hills to 
Morristown, and from there, by the way of Paramus and Ramapo, 
to the Highlands of the Hudson. On the fifteenth of July " Mad 
Anthony Wayne " made his famous charge on the rugged 
heights of Stony Point, covering himself and his men with 
glory ; and on the nineteenth of August Major Lee attacked and 
captured the fort at Powles Hook, securing one hundred and 
fifty officers and men as prisoners. 




CHAPTER XXXIII. 

'The Wedding of William Duer and Lady Kitty Stirling — 
Princeton College in the Revolution — The Famous Raid of 
the Queen^s Rangers Through the Raritan Valley. 

When the continental army marched northward to the Hudson 
it did not altogether deprive Somerset from being a locality on 
which public interest centred. Before the close of the year 1779 
several events transpired in the county which were important 
enough to attract much attention. 

On the twenty-seventh of July there were great festivities at 
Basking Ridge, the occasion being the marriage of William Duer 
to Lady Kitty Stirling. The spacious Stirling mansion was filled 
with guests, including many prominent officers of the army, and 
civil and social magnates from New York and New Jersey. 
Family traditions aver that the soldiers from a near-by camp 
assembled in front of the house and clamored loudly for a view 
of the bride. Whereupon, the dainty Lady Kitty, in fuU bridal 
array, stepped in her satin slippers out on the lawn, and there 
received the congratulations of her father's fellow-campaigners. 
This is about the last mention we have of this family in our state, 
for in a few years their handsome seat, with its broad surrounding 
acres, passed into the hands of strangers. A writer who had 
visited Lady Stirling's household at the time it counted General 
Greene among its number, and who returned to Basking Ridge 
ten years later, speaks in a pathetic way of the scene of neglect 
and decay that met her eye. The great house stood 

" In faded majesty, as if to mourn 
The dissolution of an ancient race." 

Its grand hall and decorated drawing-room were used as a 
store-house, and piled with sacks of corn and wheat. Pigs and 



494 The Stoet of an Old Farm. 

poultry roamed at will in the paved quadrangle, and its surround- 
ing stables and coach-house were fast going to ruin. Through 
the unhinged door of the latter was to be seen the great family 
coach; its glory had departed, for the medallions, coronets, and 
gilt were bespattered and stained, hens made their nests on its 
formerly sumptuous cushions, and roosted at night on the high 
dash and huge leathern springs. As has been said before, Lord 
Stirling's earthly reward for his valuable services to the country 
was an early grave, and the affectionate and grateful remem- 
brance of his countrymen. To his family he left an honored 
name and — adversity. At the outset of the war his landed prop- 
erty in New York and New Jersey was estimated to be worth 
one hundred thousand colonial pounds, above encumbrances. 
When public tranquillity was first disturbed he at once recognized 
that he should be forced to neglect his private affairs while dis- 
cussing with his sword the great questions at issue. "To meet 
with a faihire is one thing, but to commit one is another," and 
Lord Stirling's poverty at the time of his death was not due to 
want of forethought. The unhappy condition of his affairs was 
the outcome of the general prostration of the country at the close 
of the war, and the great changes in currency values. On enter- 
ing the army he obtained from the legislature an act which 
empowered commissioners to sell the most of his New Jersey 
lands, and, after paying indebtednesses, to invest the proceeds 
for his benefit. The properties were sold while the continental 
money was yet a lawful tender, but before the debts could be paid 
the tender act had been repealed. The currency rapidly depre- 
ciated, and before his death, in 1784, he had to face the fact that 
his efforts to provide for the future of his family had resulted in 
his being left without his estates, — without any value to the pro- 
ceeds of their sales, — and without his debts being paid. Credi- 
tors within the British lines attached and sold his New York prop- 
erty, his obligations soon swallowed up the homestead, and he was 
thus stripped of everything. 

Although Lord Stirling left his family without fortune, his 
daughter was not forced to become acquainted with poverty. 
Her marriage brought wealth, and gave her a social setting which 
secured all the enjoyments flowing from the possession of 
superabundant personal luxuries, and the companionship of culti- 



Princeton College in the Revolution. 495 

vated and distinguished people. Manasseh Cutler, in his journal 
of 1784, mentions having dined with Colonel Duer that summer 
in New York. He found him living in the style of a nobleman, 
displaying on his table fourteen different kinds of wine before a 
large company of guests. Mr. Cutler speaks of his hostess, Lady 
Kitty, as an accomplished, sociable woman, who most gracefully 
performed all the honors of the board, attended by two servants 
in livery. 

Another occasion of that year, sufficiently important to be 
noticed on these pages, was the college commencement held in 
September at Princeton, when six students received their diplo- 
mas. These were the first graduates since 1775, as mitil this 
year there had been no classes since early in 1776, although 
partial instruction had been given to a few students by the presi- 
dent and one of the professors in the summer of 1778. Previous 
to 1779 Nassau Hall had been used as a barrack by both armies, 
which, of course, left it in a very dilapidated and polluted condi- 
tion. We have already learned of Washington having been 
forced, on that frosty morning of the third of January, 1777, 
to train his own guns on the walls of this building, in order to 
dislodge a detachment of the 40th British regiment that had 
there sought refuge from the victorious Americans. A cannon 
ball is said to have entered the chapel, and to have passed 
through a portrait of George II. which occupied the same frame 
in which is now Peale's noted picture of Washington. This 
chapel, together with the library, was stripped of furniture and 
ornaments, Governor Belcher's portrait was stolen, and all the 
books disappeared, some of them being afterwards found in 
North Carolina, where they had been left by Cornwallis's men. 

The Presbyterian church had also been in use by the troops, 
and much mutilated. A fireplace was built against the wall, the 
chimney being carried up through the roof. But little was done 
towards repairing either the church or college building until the 
summer of 1783, when preparations were made for the autumn 
commencement, which was by far the most important one held 
for eight years. General Washington and continental congress, 
by being present, gave an unusual dignity to the occasion, the 
sittings of the national legislature being then in the library-room 
of Nassau Hall. The members, and their president Doctor Elias 



,496 -^The Story of an Old Farm. 

Boiidinot, together with Greneral Washington and the ministers 
of France an,d Holland, occupied seats in the church and listened 
to the valedicjtprian, Ashbel Green — afterwards president of the 
college — who was highly complimented for his effort by the 
general. At the close of the proceedings Washington handed to 
the college trustees a purse of fifty guineas as a contribution 
toward the repairs of Nassau Hall. The college dons, however, 
appropriated the sum to the securing of Peale's famous portrait 
of the American Fabius. 

I wonder how many of the undergraduates and alumni of the 
" College of New Jersey " are aware that their being able fco 
sing of the glories of " Old Nassau," on campus and at annual 
banquet, is due to the humility of a colonial governor ? In 1756, 
one year before the death of Governor Jonathan Belcher, that 
dignitary presented his library to the college. In gratitude for 
the gift the trustees requested that they might be allowed to 
give his name to the now venerable buildiijg, then being' erected, 
which for so many years has housed the faculty and students of 
this ancient seat of learning. His excellency declined the prof- 
fered distinction. He requested that it should be named to 
" express the honor we retain," to quote his words, " in this remote 
part of the globe, to the immortal memory of the glorious King 
William III., who was a branch of the illustrious house of Nas- 
sau, and who, under God, was the great deliverer of the British 
nation from those two monstrous furies — Popery and Slavery." 
And so it was that the trustees decided that the new collegiate 
building, " in all time to come," should be called " Nassau 
Hall." 

This was not the ^' beginning of things " for the College of 
New Jersey. The sturdy oak of alma mater, whose vast cir- 
cumference of shade now shelters some six hundred students 
and fifty professors and officers, is the one hundred and forty 
years' growth from a little acorn that was planted in Presby- 
terian soil in Elizabethtown in the year 1746. ^ Its founder and 
first president was the Reverend Jonathan Dickinson, for forty 
years the pastor of the First Presbyterian church of that town, 
whose congregation was the earliest organized in the colony for 
the worship of God in the English language. An old academy 
which occupied the site of the present lecture-room of the First 



Episcopalians and Independents. 497 

Presbyterian church, and which was burned by the enemy during 
the Revolution, contained the class recitation-rooms of the new col- 
lege, while the students, twenty in number, boarded with families 
in the village. President Dickinson's duties were many and vari- 
ous. He and an usher were the only teachers of the college, 
and his ministerial work was severe, as the members of his large 
congregation were scattered over the country as far as 
Rahway, Westfield, Connecticut Farms, and Springfield. In 
addition to the labors of so extended a parish the pastor was 
compelled, owing to his meagre salary, to cultivate a farm. He 
also practised medicine, and obtained a high reputation as a 
physician. The Massachusetts Historical Society possesses a 
copy of a pamphlet published by him in IT-iO, in which he 
gives his views of the '' Throat Distemper," a disease since 
known as diphtheria. It was not uncommon in colonial days for 
the clergy to attempt the healing of the bodies of the people as 
well as their souls ; indeed, early in the last century the minis- 
ters were almost the only physicians in the New Jersey province. 
President Dickinson was spared to serve the college but for 
one year, as he died in October, 1747. The loss of this godly 
man was greatly deplored by the entire community — he having 
even won the esteem and affection of those in the communion of 
the church of England. This circumstance is worthy of note, as 
in the last century there was little sympathy between the Pres- 
byterians and the Episcopalians. St. John's Episcopal church 
in Elizabeth had been organized in 1704 by the Reverend John 
Brooke, a missionary of the London " Society for the Propagation 
of the Gospel in Foreign Parts." Extracts from the correspon- 
dence between this society and its New Jersey missionaries will 
show the sentiment prevailing among churchmen at that time 
as to dissenters. The Reverend Edward Vaughan, in a letter 
written in 1709, speaking of the great number of Independents, 
Baptists and Quakers in New Jersey, thus wrote : — 

From which absurdities Mr. Brooke brought a considerable number of tliem to 
embrace our most pure and holy Religion, and I hope that my labors will be 
attended with no less success, and observe that those late converts are much 
more zealous than those who sucked their milk in their infancy. 

Writing again in 1711, he speaks of the mission at Wood- 
bridge, and of several families in that village as displaying a 
32 



498 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

disposition, '^ to embrace the Christian faith instead of the erro- 
neous opinions of the Quakers and Independents." In another 
letter, in 1717, he writes as follows of religious beliefs : — 

Elizabethtown is a considerable village, and equals, if not exceeds, any in the 
Province, as well in bigness as in numbers of Inhabitants ; custom and education 
has engaged them for the most part in the Congregational way, but notwith- 
standing they are not so very rigid in that persuasion as altogether to deny their 
attendance on my ministry, and to resist the force of reason and argument by 
which man}' of them have been (and will questionless be) gained upon and per- 
suaded to leave their errors and to join in Worship and Communion with the 
Established Church. 

The following is a quotation from a letter of Mr. Halliday, 
another missionary, to the secretary of the society, dated in 
November, 1716: — 

In this part of east Jersey there are three large Townships, Newark, Elizabeth- 
town and Woodbridge, which consists of upwards of a thousand families, the 
chief settlers of which were New England Independents, who are now old and 
confirmed in their erroneous way. In each of these towns there is a large Inde- 
pendent Congregation who support their preachers. The Church are only one 
handful of People from England and Scotland, not passing sixty families in any 
Congregation in this Division. By which it appears that the generality of the 
Country, being bound to their Preachers by the prejudice of their Education 
leave but a small number of the people to us. 

The above extracts are given as going to show that the first 
president of the college must have been a man of rare virtues and 
sympathies to gain the affectionate respect of a people who 
apparently considered him a teacher of error. It is evident that 
he quite won the heart of Mr. Vaughan, who himself was much 
beloved. • This missionary, though properly the rector of St. 
John's at Elizabethtown, also supplied the pulpits of several 
adjacent parishes, and in a pastorate of nearly four decades did 
a valuable work in thoroughly establishing Episcopacy in East 
New Jersey. His parishioners, in a letter to the " Propagation 
Society," expressing their happiness under his pastoral care, wrote 
that : — 

He has to the great comfort and edification of our families, in these dark and 
distant regions of the world, prosecuted the duties of his holy calling with the 
utmost application and diligence ; adorned his behaviour with an exemplary life 
and conversation ; and so behaved himself with all due prudence and fidelity 
that they who are of a contrary part have no evil thing to say of him. 

These two clergymen, after laboring in adjoining vineyards 



The College of New Jersey. 499 

for nearly forty years, lay dying at almost the same hour. In 
Doctor Murray's " Notes on Elizabeth. Town," it is stated : — 

The news of the death of Mr. Dickinson (with whom Mr. Vaughan's personal 
relations were always of the most pleasant character) was carried to Mr. Vaughan 
just as he was dying, and among the last audible words that he was heard to utter 
were these : " O that I had hold of the skirts of brother Jonathan." 

At this time the Reverend Aaron Burr — the father of the 
slayer of Alexander Hamilton — was the Presbyterian minis- 
ter at Newark, and eminent both as a scholar and as a divine. 
On the death of Mr. Dickinson the trustees of the college con- 
fided the students to his care. Under Mr. Burr's presidency 
the institution flourished at Newark for eight years, when, the 
under-graduates having increased to seventy in number, it was 
decided to locate the college permanently at Princeton. After 
much opposition on the part of the congregation of the Presby- 
terian church, who protested against the loss of their pastor, Mr. 
Burr and his young men, in October, 1757, betook themselves 
southward.* At this time Princeton was already a village of 
some importance. Being located on the thoroughfare between 
New York and Philadelphia — the ^'King's highway" — its 
vicinity was well peopled while the greater part of New Jersey 
was yet mantled in continuous forest. Professor Kalm, the 
Swedish botanist, who passed through Princeton in the year 
1748, found it :— 

A town of wooden houses, with gardens and pastures between them. The 
woods were cut away, and the country so cultivated that one might have imagined 
himself in Europe. 

* Aaron Burr married a daughter of Jonathan Edwards, the celebrated divine 
who succeeded him in the presidential chair of the College of New Jersey. 
Joseph Shippen, Jr., while a college student at Newark, wrote to his father in 
Philadelphia on the 6th of July, 1752, saying, "Mr. Burr on the last of May 
made a journey into New England, and during his absence made a visit of about 
three days to the Rev. Mr. Edwards' daughter at Stockbridge, in which short 
time, though he had no acquaintance with, nor indeed, had even seen the la<ly 
these six years, I suppose he accomplished his whole design ; for it was not above 
a fortnight before he sent a young fellow, who came out of college last fall, into 
New England to conduct her and her mother down here. They came to town on 
Saturday, the 27th ult., and on the Monday evening following the nuptial cere- 
monies were celebrated between Mr. Burr and the young lady." The writer goes 
on to say that he thinks Miss Edwards a person of great beauty, but rather too 
young for the president. She was then twenty-one while Mr. Burr had reached 
his thirty-seventh year. 



500 The Story of an Old Farm. 

We shall not be much out of the way in classing the college at 
that time with grammar schools of the present day, as many of 
the pupils of such schools are now familiar with studies of which 
even the names were unknown to the Princeton lads ,of the last 
century. Students under the presidency of Aaron Burr, or 
even of Doctor Stanhope Smith, would have been aghast at 
much of the required and elective work of the present curricu- 
lum. '''Ologies" were largely unknown; metaphysics, psycho- 
logy, biology, and even applied chemistry were not thought of, 
and the course of studies was mostly confined to those that 
would now be considered fundamental. Even college presidents 
of the early days had but a limited knowledge of what would 
now be included in a broad education ; their most pronounced 
strength lay in tlie direction of polemic and didactic theology. 
The Reverend W. W. Blauvelt, the late emeritus pastor of Lam- 
ingtou Presbyterian church of Somerset county, at the time of his 
recent death was the oldest graduate of another New Jersey 
college — Rutgers. He was of the class of 1814, having received 
his degree when only fourteen years old. In some interesting 
reminiscences published by him a few years ago, he speaks as 
follows of the head of Rutgers' faculty : — 

Our venerable President (Dr. Livingston) remarked in my presence :" The 
chemists talk of their oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen. Fools, fools! what do 
they know about it? After all it is nothing but matter.^' This aged father 
found it difficult to admit that there had been any advance in science since the 
time when, sixty years before, he completed his course at the University of Ley- 
den in Holland. 

Speaking of Doctor Blauvelt having graduated at the age of 
fourteen brings to mind the fact that in the olden time the course 
was short at Princeton. Among its students we find that Doctor 
Benjamin Rush, of the class of 1760, graduated at fifteen ; Aaron 
Burr, our country's third vice-president, of the <;lass of 1772, at 
sixteen ; Adjutant-General Joseph Reed, whose local knowledge 
contributed so greatly to Washington's success at the battle of 
Princeton, of the class of 1757, graduated at sixteen ; and 
" Light-Horse Harry Lee," of the class of 1774, at seventeen. 
In fact, most students of the last century, and even early in the 
present one, received their parchments at an age when now they 
would be but thinking of matriculation. 



The Queen's American Rangers. 501 

A third event that especially marks the year 1779 in New 
Jersey's Revolutionary history is the noted raid of the Queen's 
Rangers in October through Middlesex and Somerset counties. 
In cleverness of conception and in rapidity and dash of execu- 
tion this military enterprise was considered by both armies as 
being among the most brilliant of the war. The germ or nucleus 
of this command is to be found in a corps of partisan rangers, 
half hunters, half woodsmen, who were held in high repute in 
colonial times. Their first commander was Major Robert Rogers 
of New Hampshire, and under him they performed many ardu- 
ous and valuable services on the French and English fighting- 
ground between Ticonderoga and Crown Point. This officer 
disciplined his men until they were equally at home in the open 
country or on forest trails, in whaleboats, canoes, or on snow- 
shoes, in civilized or in savage warfare. He was thoroughly 
versed in all the arts of woodcraft, his endurance and fearless 
bravery were phenomenal, and until the Revolution he and his 
rangers were never mentioned without honor. * 

After the victory of Wolfe at Quebec, the capitulation of the 
French and the surrender of all Canada Rogers Avas given com- 
mand of the expedition that was sent to the west to take posses- 
sion of those outposts on the extreme frontier where still floated 
the lilies of France. While on this hazardous journey, at the 
present site of Cleveland, the English for the first time met the 
savage warrior Pontiac, whose conspiracy a few years later made 
famous. 

At the breaking out of the Revolution Rogers, adhering to the 
Crown, was commissioned a major and authorized to raise a corps 
of hussars and infantry, to be called the Queen's American Rangers. 
He procured his men mainly from among the refugees of New 
York and Connecticut, and did excellent service during the early 
part of the war. In 1777 he resigned and went to England. While 
there, he was appointed, Avith the rank of lieutenant-colonel, ta 
the command of the King's Rangers, another refugee corps. 
Among the officers in this second body of rangers were several 

* Rogers' Rock on Lake George derives its name from this partisan soldier. 
During the French war, one day — so runs the story — after performing prodifjies 
of valor, he escaped from a pursuing party of Indians by sliding on snowslioes 
down its precipitous side to the frozen lake below. 



502 The Story of an Old Farm. 

renegade Jerseymen, including that Captain John Hatfield who, 
it is supposed, so cruelly hung the poor butcher. Ball, at Bergen 
Point, and Lieutenant Richard Lippencott, the dastard who cer- 
tainly did hang Captain Joshua Huddy in 1782, near Sandy 
Hook. When Rogers resigned from the Queen's Rangers, John 
Graves Simcoe, a brave young officer of the 40th British regi- 
ment of foot, who had distinguished himself at the battle of 
Brandywine, applied for and received the command, with the 
rank of major. The Queen's Rangers under his control was always 
in the advance or on the flank of the British army and became 
the most efficient legionary corps in the English service ; its men 
won laurels for themselves and their young commander in many 
well-conducted raids and brilliant actions. Simcoe, who was 
soon promoted to be a lieutenant-colonel, was ever on the alert ; 
he infused into his men his own spirit of tireless energy, and Sir 
Henry Clinton, in one of his reports to his government, asserts 
that the rangers within three years after this dashing young 
officer had taken command, killed, or made prisoners, twice their 
own number. 

Simcoe was born in 1753, and at an early age passed through 
Eton and Oxford with much honor. Though a student who 
always stood foremost among his fellows, his aspirations were 
ever in the direction of a military life, and when but nineteen 
years old he was commissioned an ensign in the army. He con- 
tinued to be a most diligent student; it is said that Tacitus and 
Xenophen were his companions in camp, and that few retired 
scholars read more than did this officer, even when employed on 
the most active duties. He rapidly rose to a high rank, and died 
a lieutenant-general at the age of fifty-four years, after having 
enjoyed many titles and preferments — among others that of gover- 
nor-general of Canada. Simcoe was an honest fighter and a good 
hater, and never outgrew his antipathy to anything and every- 
thing American. In his orders he did not hesitate to characterize 
his foes as a "mean and despicable enemy," and his joumal, 
though published by himself long after the war, invariably speaks 
of the American army as "the rebels," and its commander-in- 
chief as "Mr. Washington." Many years later, when he was 
ruling Canada, the Duke of Rochefoucault-Liancourt wrote of him 
as follows: — 



Simcoe's Raid in the Raritan Valley. 503 

But for this inveterate hatred against the United States, which he too loudly 
professes, and which carries him too far, General Simcoe appears in tlie most 
advantageous light. He is just, active, enlightened, brave, frank, and possesses the 
confidence of the country, of the troops, and of all tliose who join him in the 
administration of public affairs. 

It was on the morning of the twenty-sixth of October that this 
famous raid of the Queen's Rangers through the Raritan valley 
occurred. Its object is said to have been two-fold, — the capture 
of Governor Livingston, whom Simcoe had been falsely informed 
was staying with Philip Van Home at " Phil's Hill " — Middle- 
brook ; and the destruction of fifty large flat-boats which he had 
been told were at Van Veghten's bridge, on their way to the army. 
These boats had been built on the Delaware by Washington's 
orders so as tobe ready to aid in an attack on New York city which 
he was then meditating. They held seventy men each, and had been 
hauled across country on wheels to the Raritan. Simcoe's plan 
was to move with his cavalry with great expedition from Amboy 
to Bound Brook and Van Veghten's bridge; and then hastily 
return on the opposite side of the Raritan. When nearing New 
Brunswick he purposed bearing off to the south, in the hopes of 
being able to entice the militia and others, that by this time might 
be following him, into an ambuscade near the South river, where 
a supporting force of his infantry were to lie in wait for the 
expected victims. 

To execute this purpose Major Richard Armstrong, who com- 
manded the foot, was despatched to South Amboy, from which 
place he was directed to march with haste and in silence six 
miles to the bridge crossing South river, the point where his 
troops were to await in ambush the arrival of the cavalry with, 
it was hoped, the Jersey militia in pursuit. Colonel Simcoe, 
with a mounted force of about eighty picked men, had expected to 
embark at Billop's-point, Staten Island, for Perth Amboy early on 
the night of the twenty-fifth, but owing to the lateness of the hour 
at which his bateaux arrived it was six in the morning before he 
was fairly on the march. Major Armstrong, with the foot, who 
had crossed with Simcoe in order to guard the approaches to the 
town, then re-embarked for South Amboy. The raiding column 
embraced forty-six men of the Ranger hussars, twenty-two of the 
Buck's light dragoons, (a Pennsylvania refugee corps), com- 
manded by Captain Sandford, and a few guides and volunteers. 



504 The Stoey of an Old Farm. 

under Lieutenant James Stewart. This last officer was a loyalist 
Jerseyman, and well known and hated in Middlesex and Somerset 
as "Tory Jim." 

Simcoe moved with great rapidity through Piscataway town- 
ship to Quibbletown — New Market — taking pains on the way to 
impress everyone met with the idea that his force was a body of 
Americans. This he was the better able to do because the 
uniform of his command differed but little from that of Lee's 
legion, the men wearing green coatees, leather breeches, and 
cocked hats bound with white braid. Indeed, Lee, who greatly 
admired Simcoe, says in his memoirs that the colonel,, with the 
most successful audacity, stopped during the march at a depot of 
forage, and announced to the commissary that his force was . the 
Virginia light-horse. He drew the forage he needed, paying the 
customary vouchers therefor, signing them in the name of Lee's 
quartermaster. Before reaching Quibbletown one Justice Crow 
was overtaken, whom the colonel, in order to make him believe 
that the raiders were from Washington's army, charged with being 
a tory: to further the belief the justice for a time was carried 
along, under guard, with the detachment, notwithstanding the 
protestations of the countryman that he had " only been 
a-sparkin'." 

A short halt was made at the Quibbletown tavern, ostensibly to 
look for tories ; then the troopers hurried on to Bound Brook 
where they rested for a little while at a public house kept by 
Peter Harpending, and afterwards known as the Frelinghuysen 
tavern. It stood on the main street where is now the store and 
dwelling of B. B, Matthews. Its boniface was a stanch patriot 
and was one of the men of Somerset whom the Howes stigmatised 
as "arch-traitors," and excepted from the general amnesty offered 
in 1776. This was not the first appearance of the Queen's 
Rangers in Bound Brook. An affidavit made in 1782, by the 
widow of Ennis Graham, shows that on the nineteenth of Decem- 
ber, 1776, this partisan corps suddenly dashed into the village 
under the guidance of George H. Fisher, a tory refugee. Among 
the other inhabitants who suffered at their hands was her husband, 
who was robbed of cash, watches, and jewelry. A few days later 
he went to New Brunswick hoping to obtain some satisfaction from 
British headquarters; his satisfaction proved to be the further loss 



SiMCOE AT Van Veghten's Bridge. 505 

of the fine horse he rode, which was taken from him "for his 
majesty's service." 

On leaving Bound Brook Colonel Simcoe, having secured a 
guide in a country lad, made his way up the heights toward 
Chimney Rock, to Washington's camp of the year before. 
According to an account published in "Rivington's Gazette" by a 
junior officer accompanying the expedition it was intended to 
destroy the huts and buildings, but on learning thai they had 
been sold to some of the inhabitants the colonel decided to leave 
them standing. The raiders' next stop was at Philip Van 
Home's, Middlebrook, where they were disappointed at not 
finding Governor Livingston. Here, in lieu of nobler game, 
they captured a captain, a lieutenant, and another person, who 
being sick were placed under parole. The troops then contin- 
ued their march to Van Veghten's bridge, on the Raritan. The 
greater part of the boats they expected to find there had been 
sent forward, but, with hand-grenades brought for the purpose, 
they destroyed eighteen that were left, together with their trav- 
eling carriages, an amnunition wagon, some harness, and a quan- 
tity of forage and stores. Here they committed what the 
Reverend Doctor Messier characterizes as a barbarous action — 
the burning of the Dutch Reformed church building. Simcoe, 
in his report of the raid, excused this act by saying that the 
"Dutch Meeting" — as he termed it — had been converted into 
a forage depot, and that a rifle shot was fired at the soldiers from 
the opposite side of the river. Messier insists that this is not 
true ; asserting that he was informed by a creditable eye-wit- 
ness that the only forage was the ropes and tackle used in bring- 
ing the boats from the Delaware •, that the shot was from a 
young man "out shooting pigeons," who, at a distance of six 
hundred feet, to alarm the dragoons discharged his fowling- 
piece, and then ran off to escape capture. 

The rangers were not over one hour at Van Veghten's bridge ; 
they then crossed the Raritan and pushed on to Hillsborough — 
Millstone. There they burned the Somerset court-house, after 
first releasing from jail three loyalist prisoners, one of them, 
according to Simcoe's report, being a dreadfid spectacle ; " he 
appeared to have been almost starved and was chained to the 
floor." This county building stood about twelve rods west of 



S06 The Story of an Old Farm. 

the present bridge over the Millstone. While burning, its flames 
ignited and consumed the near-by dwellings of William Cocks 
and Cornelius Lott, the latter being valued, according to its own- 
er's affidavit, at six hundred and twenty pounds ten shillings and 
eleven pence. By this time the country people were up in arms 
and the militia gathering, so the column was soon again in 
motion. Filing to the east it crossed the river and hurried 
along the, Arawell road in the direction of New Brunswick. 
Simcoe's plan was, on reaching the dwelling of Garret Voor- 
hees, which was supposed to be standing at the corner of a 
cross-road leatling into the Princeton road, to turn to the right 
and make his way rapidly to the South river, where he hoped to 
pilot his pursuers into the ambuscade. Both he and his guide 
kept a bright lookout for the house which was to mark the diverg- 
ing road. Unhappily for the success of the expedition they were 
neither of them aware that this was one of the many buildings 
that the British had wantonly destroyed when they retreated 
from Millstone, in Jmie, 1777. Consequently the rangers passed 
this cross-road at a sharp trot without recognizing it, and were 
within two miles of New Brunswick before the error was known. 
During the early part of the march of this command its char- 
acter had not been discovered, but on reaching Quibbletown 
some one at the tavern recognized Colonel Simcoe. A messen- 
ger was at once dispatched to New Brunswick, whereupon Col- 
onel John Neilson moved with his regiment — the 2d MidiUesex 
militia — to Raritan Landing, where the smoke from the burning 
buildings at Millstone announced the position of the enemy. Had 
Neilson crossed the river, with but little doubt the raiding column 
would have been either captured or destroyed ; but he, thinking 
that the rangers must re-embark where they had landed in the 
morning, remained on the Middlesex side to oppose their passage 
of the bridge. Meanwhile he sent forward Captain Moses 
Guest with thirty-five men to harass the foe on the march. This 
officer, on reaching a point where the narrow Amwell road was 
flanked by thick woods, ambushed his men and awaited the com- 
ing of the enemy. The British colonel's situation had now 
grown distressing. He well knew that his guide was at fault and 
had missed the cross-road ; shots were popping on his flanks, a 
Captain Voorhees, with some militia horsemen, was pressing on 



Capture of Colonel Simcoe. 507 

his rear, and lie was in great concern over possible ambuscades 
in front. When the wood was reached where Guest and his men 
lay concealed, Simcoe, who was riding in advance with the 
guide, was fearful that it contained an ambushed enemy. On 
discovering an opening in the fence he wheeled his horse, intend- 
ing to lead his men to the right, and thus avoid the possible dan- 
ger. Just then, as he said in his report, he heard the words 
" Now ! Now !" and knew nothing more until he found himself a 
prisoner in the hands of the Americans. A sudden fusillade had 
killed his horse with five bullets, and stretched him on the 
ground, stunned by the violence of the fall. His troopers, being 
on the canter, swept by without discovering that it was intended 
to leave the highway. The timber was too dense to admit of 
charging the enemy, so the rangers pushed on through the woods, 
in open files, receiving a volley from the militia which killed one 
man, and wounded three others and some horses. 

The command now devolved on Captain Sandford of the 
Bucks county troop, who, supposing the colonel to be killed, 
continued toward New Brunswick at an increasing pace. The 
raiders found themselves in a critical situation. The mounted 
force hanging on their rear were increasing in numbers, and the 
militiamen in their front were rapidly multiplying to oppose 
their further advance. But the desire of the rangers was to 
avoid, not to enter. New Brunswick, so, on reaching a point 
within the present city limits where Town lane and Greorge's 
road come together. Captain Sandford suddenly faced about his 
squadron and charged the pursuers, putting them to flight. Their 
leader, Captain Peter V. Voorhees, in attempting to break 
through a fence became entangled, and was so cut and slashed 
by the troopers' sabres that he died in a few hours. The kill- 
ing of this officer was considered by the Americans little less 
than a murder, as he was wholly in the enemy's hands and incap- 
able of resistance. Captain Voorhees' death was greatly 
lamented ; he was a brother-in-law of Colonel Neilson of New 
Brunswick, and a gallant officer of the continental line, having 
entered the service in 1775 as a second-lieutenant in New Jer- 
sey's first establishment of troops. Since November, 1777, he 
had commanded a company in Colonel Matthias Ogden's 1st 
Regiment of the New Jersey line, with which he had just made 



508 The Stoky of an Old Farm. 

the campaign under General Sullivan against the Six Nations^ 
He was on leave, and was to have been married on the following 
day — indeed, it is said that he was on his way to visit h'l&Jiaiicee 
when he came upon a party of militia in pursuit of the Queen's 
Rangers, and put himself at their head. 

Captain Sandford's anxiety was now to reach his body of sup- 
porting infantry, so, as recounted in the before quoted junior 
officer's report of the expedition, in order to delude the enemy 
in his front he marched to the left as if intending to enter New 
Brunswick. The Americans in front then pushed to their right, 
in order to check a retreat in that direction. Whereupon the 
rangers, taking advantage of that move, retraced their steps 
and with a sharp gallop gained the left flank of the Jerseymen, 
and thus made their escape in the direction of South river. 
Before four o'clock in the afternoon Captain Sandford with his 
cavalry had joined Major Armstrong and the foot at the bridge, 
and that night the combined forces crossed from South* Amboy to 
Staten Island. There was some little skirmishing on the way 
with small parties of militia, without much result ; there were 
wounds given on both sides; one hussar — MoUoy — was killed, 
and two Americans made prisoners. Although the expedition 
failed in drawing the militia into the ambuscade, the exploit, alto- 
gether, reflected great credit on the British arms, and but for the 
loss of Simcoe it would have been considered brilliantly success- 
ful. At least sixty miles of hostile country were passed over 
with the loss of but few men, about thirty prisoners were 
secured, much property destroyed, and many bad horses 
exchanged for good ones taken from the prisoners and the 
country people. 

When Simcoe's horse was shot from under him, and he fell 
stunned to the ground. Doctor Messier says that he would have 
been killed had not James Schureraan, of New Brunswick, saved 
his life by thrusting aside the bayonet of a militia private who 
lunged at him with murderous intent. Others claim that it was 
Jonathan Ford Morris, a young medical student, who so deftly 
averted the soldier's blow. He it was, at least, who propped the 
British colonel against a tree, bled him until restored to conscious- 
ness, and bestowed on him other medical and friendly attentions. 
Morris was at this time but nineteen years old, having one year 



The Burning of Raritan Church. 509 

before resigned a lieutenancy in Procter's artillery regiment. He 
entered the army at the early age of sixteen and served with 
merit as a private, surgeon's mate and lieutenant ; his love of 
country, or of adventure, had led him to march with the militia 
as a volunteer when they set off from New Brunswick on that 
October day to check the progress of the Queen's Rangers. 
After the war he became a popular and successful physician and 
surgeon, settling first at Bound Brook, and later at Somerville 
where he died in 1810. Colonel Simcoe was ever grateful to 
Doctor Morris for his services on this occasion, and, when gover- 
nor-general of Canada, wrote him urging that he should remove 
to the British Possessions in order to receive substantial proof of 
an Englishman's gratitude. But Morris was unwilling to 
^ixchange his flag and fealty in order to secure personal favor 
and advancement. 

It is always both curious and interesting to observe the rela- 
tion existing between events and consequences. As to the 
former we are prone to reach immediate and often false conclu- 
sions, for it is only in the light of subsequent years that their 
true value can be ascertained. Had Colonel Simcoe magnani- 
mously spared the " Dutch meeting," and the court-house at 
Hillsborough it is not impossible that to-day there would be no 
Somerville, or at least that that town would not now flourish as 
the county-seat of Somerset. The people of Bridgewater town- 
ship, therefore, can at the present time reflect with equanimity 
upon the devastations perpetrated during this famous raid. But 
when these two most valued buildings in the community were 
burned, the loss was considered most grievous. This is espe- 
cially true as to the destruction of the Dutch house of worship ; 
for over half a century it had been the rallying point for the 
religious and social interests of a majority of the citizens. Here 
they and their fathers had gathered to listen to that inspired Hol- 
land worthy, Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, and to his no less 
beloved son, John ; here they had brought their children to be 
baptized, and here under the sods surrounding its walls lay two 
generations of their dead. 

Being without a church building had a most baneful influence 
upon the cause of religion, and, together with the evil eff"ects 
produced by the war, produced a low condition of morals that 



510 The Story of an Old Farm. 

was most hurtful to the community. Owing to the poverty of 
the times it was several years before the congregation could pro- 
vide a respectable edifice for church services. A temporary 
structure was secured at the joint expense of the county free- 
holders and the church consistory, by moving up from Camp 
Middlebrook to the present site of Sonierville a log building that 
had been used by the army for court-martial and other purposes. 
This served as a court and church building until 1784 when, 
after much discussion as to the locality most available for estab- 
lishing the county town, a log court-house was built about twelve 
rods east of the present structure. In 1798 the present court- 
house was erected, and three years later we have the first official 
record, of the name, Somerville. In 1784 it was resolved at a 
public meeting that a new church edifice should be built, and a 
subscription list was started in which it was permitted sub- 
scribers to indicate whether their preferences were for the new 
location, then called Tunison's tavern, or the old one at Van 
Veghten's bridge. The building of the new court-house had 
insured the nucleus of a population at the former place, conse- 
quently, the majority of the subscribers favoring Somerset court- 
house, the new church was there built, and completed in 1788 — 
a brick structure, by far the most substantial in the county. 
Doctor Messier records that, though many alterations and addi- 
tions have been made, the building remains essentially the same 
as when erected — now one hundred years ago. 




X^'^'^-'^^s^f 



CHAPTER XXXIV. 

The Cold Winter of 1780 — Washington's Army Again in 
Morristown — Varied and Interesting Camp Experiences — 
Fighting at Connecticut Farms and Springfield. 

A work of this character necessarily covers periods of time 
devoid of interest. This particularly applies to those parts 
chronicling the affairs of the occupants of the ^' Old Stone 
House." It is hardly to be supposed that their daily experiences 
could at all times have been so replete with incidents as to add 
to the weight of this narrative. During these days of Revolu- 
tionary turmoil the current of domestic life in this dwelling flowed 
peacefully on in sober comfort, for within its walls was an orderly 
and a cheerful household, where love and duty kindly blended, and 
where each day's busy hours wore away in the homely toils and 
pleasures usual with farm families. Aaron's children now num- 
bered five, — the final complement, — Margaret having been born 
on the twenty-second of December, 1767, and Maria, on the 
twenty-fourth of March, 1771. John, who had long ere this been 
released from the clutches of the British, was again off soldiering, 
this time with the continental line. Daniel, now a sturdy boy of 
sixteen, was aiding his father in the tannery and on the farm, 
and educating himself so as to eventually become an able man of 
business and his father's partner. Two of the girls were old 
enough to take upon themselves much of the cares of indoors ; 
and, doubtless, as was the custom with farmer's daughters, 
waited each night at the bars, with clinking pails and wooden 
stools, while the motherly brown cows came lowing up the lane, 
with big depending bags ready to give down the milky torrents. 
War-times naturally brought privations and some discomforts, 
but there were compensations, not only in the increased value 



"512 The Story of an Old Farm. 

given to farm and tannery products, but in the many excite- 
ments that ruled the hour, which it is reasonable to suppose 
must have given added zest to the ordinarily quiet life of this 
rural community. Later on it is not improbable that we shall 
find material in the daily routine of this family's existence that 
will make interesting reading ; but before again taking up such 
homely topics we must wait until camps and their influences 
have disappeared from the neighborhood. Just now we will turn 
once more to the continental army, which is to spend this winter 
and spring — 1780 — on the northeast border of Somerset. 

'' Gaine's Mercury" announced on the sixth of December that, 
with the exception of a number of Eastern men to be hutted on 
the east side of the North river under the command of Gates, and 
a garrison of twelve hundred left at West Point, "all the army 
are marching down the country in divisions under their proper 
generals, supposed for Morris county." This journal was right as 
to the destination of the troops. Early in December the army 
went into winter quarters between Morristown and Mendliara, 
Washington establishing himself at the residence of the widow of 
Colonel Jacob Ford, on the Newark turnpike — now the " Wash- 
ington Headquarters." Her family gave up all of the building 
excepting two rooms, but as the general's household comprised 
eighteen persons he was much inconvenienced for want of space. 
He wrote to Greene, who was still quartermaster-general, in Jan- 
uary, complaining of his contracted quarters, saying : — " all Mrs. 
Ford's family are crowded together in her kitchen, and scarce one 
of them able to talk for colds they have caught." This resulted 
in a small log kitchen being attached to the east end of the man- 
sion, and a larger log house being erected which furnished offices 
for the commander-in-chief, his aides and secretaries. The life 
guard were barracked in fifty rude huts that were set up in a tri- 
angular bit of meadow just east of the dwelling, from where, in 
case of alarm, the house could in a few moments be reached and 
surrounded. 

Washington's first letter after the establishment of the camp 

was dated the seventh of December ; in it he recites that '' the 

main army lies within three or four miles of the town." The 

-exact location was on Kimball Hill about four miles southwest 

. of Morristown, midway between, and on a crossroad leading from, 



The Camp on Kimball Hill. 513 

the roads running to Basking Ridge and to Mendhara. About 
one thousand acres were occupied, embracing properties then 
known as the Kimball and Wicks' farms, a portion of the latter 
now being owned by Samuel B. Axtell. The Wicks dwelling is 
still extant, and serves as an excellent example of colonial farm 
architecture. " Kimball Hill " commands extensive views rang- 
ing from Schooley's mountain on the west to the Short Hills on 
the east, and from the New York Highlands on the north to the 
heights above the Raritan on the south. The encampment was 
pitched on this commanding elevation because of its being anatural 
watch-tower, enabling the army to be ever on the alert against 
surprise or invasion. During each night men were constantly 
scanning the horizon to discover the first tongue of flame leaping 
heavenward from any of the many beacons that were planted on 
the spurs of the encircling hills between the Delaware, Hudson, 
and Shrewsbury. During the day, in case of an alarm, signal 
guns were fired from the beacon-posts. The cannon that oftenest 
had occasion to shriek warnings from its iron throat became his- 
torically known as the "Old Sow;" it was an eighteen-pounder 
set up at the beacon-post on the Short Hills just back of Springfield. 
However advantageous Kimball Hill may have been in a 
military sense it proved a very bleak and inhospitable camping 
ground, and it was not long before some of the line officers of 
the army were making unfavorable comparisons between this 
exposed situation and the warm, near-by Lowantica valley that 
had sheltered the encampment of three years before. The 
weather this winter was in extraordinary contrast to the mildness 
of the preceding one ; the cold was the severest ever known in 
the colonies, and the snow fell almost continuously from the tenth 
of November until far into March. The Lower bay, New York 
bay and Hudson river were equally firm as the land, and people 
crossed Long Island sound from Connecticut to Lloyd's Neck, a 
distance of twelve miles, as if on a prairie. The ice of New 
York bay was thick enough to enable two hundred sleigh-loads 
of provisions, drawn by two horses each and escorted by two 
hundred cavalry, to cross from New York to Staten Island. The 
Raritan river was frozen solid for four months, during which time 
its surface was more used as a thoroughfare for teams than were 

the highways on its banks. 
33 



514 The Story of an Old Fa km. 

In January the Somerset militia were called out — not to fight 
the king of England- -this time the enemy was the king of 
storms, for on the night of the third the greatest body of snow 
fell known during the war. The whole face of the country lay 
buried from three to five feet deep ; roads, fences and frozen 
streams were obliterated, and, as the storm had been accompanied 
by a very high wind, in places the drifts were piled ten to twelve 
feet high. The army on Kimball Hill suffered severely, as the 
weather was intensely cold. Thacher tells that officers were 
almost smothered in the snow because of the collapsing of their 
tents by the high winds ; and, to quote another witness and suf- 
ferer: " No man could endure the violence of the storm many 
minutes without danger of his life." The roads being blocked, 
great difficulty was experienced in procuring fuel and supplies, 
and the army was on the point of disbanding for want of pro- 
visions. So it was that the militia were called upon to break the 
roads from Morristown to Hackettstown on the north, and to 
Princeton on the south. In addition, the people were requested 
to come to the aid of the militia with their teams. Greene wrote 
to Colonel Hathaway : — 

The roads must be kept open by the inhabitants or the army cannot be sub- 
sisted ; and unless good people immediately lend assistance to forward supplies 
the army must disband. Tlie dreadful consequences of such an event 1 will not 
torture your feelings with a description of; but remember, the surrounding 
inhabitants will experience the first melancholy effects of such a raging evil. * * * 
You will call to your aid the overseers of highways and every other order of 
men who can give despatch and success to the business. 

Notwithstanding the aid furnished by militia and inhabitants 
in breaking the roads, such a great body of snow paralyzed all 
arteries of travel, and the army was soon in an extremity for 
provisions. Washington was forced to levy on the inhabitants 
for cattle, flour and grain. He called upon the magistrates of 
the respective counties to undertake the business of relieving 
the distresses of the troops ; taking care at the same time to 
notify them that a force had been detailed to impress the neces- 
sary supplies, should the people fail to voluntarily alleviate the 
sufferings of the men. The commanders of the forces were 
directed to show great tenderness toward the inhabitants in case 
such extreme measures became necessary ; care was to be taken 
that families should not be deprived of their milch cows, or of 



Currency Depreciation in 1780. 515 

needed subsistence. The necessity for a recourse to severity 
happily did not arise, as the sympathies of the people were at 
once enlisted, and relief was afforded without delay or indecision. 

The distressing situation of the army was not altogether due 
to the transportation of supplies being obstructed by the uncom- 
mon rigor of the weather. The depreciation of the currency had 
increased to an alarming extent. Congress had made continen- 
tal paper legal tender for debts, however contracted ; but its 
value steadily decreased, until by 1780 it was almost impos- 
sible to determine how much paper money represented one 
Spanish milled dollar, which at that time was the unit of value. 
Credit was thus prostrated and the commissaries found them- 
selves without a current purchasing medium with which to 
secure adequate supplies. In looking over old files of that time 
it is interesting to observe the ruling prices in continental money. 
In 1779 a horse was sold at Camp Middlebrook for six hundred 
dollars currency that had been offered for eighty silver dollars. 
A year later paper values had so much more decreased that a 
mare of eleven years sold at a vendue held in February, 1780, 
for eight hundred and five pounds. At the same auction a fry- 
ing-pan brought twenty-five pounds ; a wood-saw, thirty-seven 
pounds, ten shillings ; three rusty bone-handle knives and forks, 
twenty-two pounds, ten shillings ; an old eight-day clock in a 
walnut case, two hundred and fifty pounds; fifty sheaves of oats 
eighty pounds, and other sales were made in like proportion. 

Notwithstanding that at this time the troops were in a deplor- 
able condition as to provisions and clothing, Washington was not 
willing to let pass an apparently opportune moment for striking a 
blow at the enemy on Staten Island. The frost had converted 
the Kills into a solid bridge. On the afternoon of the fourteenth 
of January a detachment of foot and artillery set out from the 
Morristown parade on sleds to reinforce the brigade lying at 
Elizabethtown. Early on the fifteenth the party, twentv-five 
hundred strong, commanded by Lord Stirling, crossed at De 
Hart's point and marched on the enemy's works. The enter- 
prise proved a failure. The British garrison having been 
strongly reinforced an assault was not attempted ; after some 
skirmishing the Americans retired, bringing with them a few 
prisoners, the casualties being not many on either side. Ten 



516 The Story of an Old Farm. 

days later the British made a return visit to the Jersey shore, 
their enterprise being crowned with more success than had the 
Americans' sally on Staten Island. At midnight on the twenty- 
fifth of January about four hundred infantry and one hundred 
dragoons, commanded by the tory Lieutenant-Colonel Buskirk, 
crossed on the ice at Trembly's point and surprised Elizabeth- 
town. Four officers and about sixty privates were captured, the 
inhabitants were plundered, and. the court-house and the Presby- 
terian church burned. The same night a small party attacked. 
Newark with equal success, burning the academy. 

Human nature is ever the same. Many a brave Englishman 
prepared for death at Waterloo by dancing the night before at 
the Duchess of Richmond's ball. So it was with our Revolution- 
ary soldiers — recreations must be had even in the face of the 
most adverse circumstances. Early in the winter subscription 
balls, or assemblies, were established at Morristown, Washington 
and his leading generals heading the subscription list. As was 
usual with each annual encampment there was a fair sprinkling 
of ladies with the army. Mrs. Washington arrived before the 
first of the year, having passed through Trenton on the twenty- 
eighth of December, where a troop of horse paraded in her 
honor ; Mrs. Greene and Mrs. Knox were in camp, and many 
other ladies had joined their husbands. General Greene's sec- 
ond son, Nathanael, was born at this encampment. This fledge- 
ling of turbulent war times, whose genesis was horizoned by the 
hills of Morris, was destined to live eighty useful years, and to 
be the father of the general's biographer, Professor George W. 
Greene. ' 

A young lady reached Morristown during the winter whose 
arrival created a flutter in camp society, especially among the 
young men surrounding headquarters. It was Miss Betsey 
Schuyler, who came to visit her friend, the wife of Doctor Coch- 
ran who occupied a cottage in the village. This physician was 
one of the best known men in the army, his cheery nature and 
abundant good humor securing for him hosts of friends. From 
April, 1777, he had been surgeon-general in the general hospi- 
tal, and in October, 1780, he was taken into Washington's mili- 
tary family, being appointed chief physician and surgeon to the 
armv. Elizabeth Schuyler was the second daughter of General 



Colonel Hamilton Meets Elizabeth Schutlee. 517 

Philip Schuyler, who, having recently resigned from the army, 
had on the sixteenth of November taken his seat in congress as 
delegate from New York. She was a beauty and a belle, very 
small and delicately formed, with an oval face and bewitching 
black eyes. Colonel Tench Tilghman, on meeting her for the 
first time, described her as being : — 

A brunette, with the most good-natured lively dark eyes that I ever saw, 
which threw a beam of good temper and benevolence over her entire counte- 
nance. 

This handsome staff-officer was just then proof against her 
fascinations, being no longer fancy free. His affections were 
already enlisted in the direction of his cousin, Anna Maria Tilgh- 
man, whom he had met for the first time a few months before 
while on a furlough, and who subsequently became his wife. It 
was not so, however, with his brother staff-officer, the distin- 
guished Colonel Hamilton, who succumbed at once to the attrac- 
tions of this imperious little beauty. Their friendship quickly 
grew^ into a sweeter bondage ; anon the god of war lost that first 
place he had held so long in the interests of the young soldier ; 
rugged Mars made way for the gentler god, who soon guided the 
barque of these young people — freighted with their new affec- 
tions — into the safe harbor of matrimony. 

On the nineteenth of April the Chevalier de la Luzerne, who 
had succeeded Gerard as minister from France, and Don Juan 
de Miralles, whose acquaintance we made at Camp Middle- 
brook, with their suites, arrived at headquarters on a visit. 
They were received with great honors ; salvos of artillery were 
fired, and a brilliant escort of officers and orderlies was sent to 
meet them at the Somerset county line. Out of compliment to 
these distinguished guests, on the twenty-fourth four brigades of 
the army were paraded in review. The ceremonies began Avith 
the discharge of thirteen cannon, whereupon, as a witness 
recites : — 

The foreign officers entered the field mounted on elegant horses, which with 
General Wasiiington, the general officers of our army with their aides and servants, 
formed a most splendid cavalcade, which attracted tiie attention of a vast con- 
course of spectators. 

A reviewing stand had been erected, upon which were seated 
Governor Livingston, his wife and daughters, as well as many 



518 The Story of an Old Farm. 

gentlemen and ladies of distinction from different parts of the 
country. The generals and guests received the review mounted, 
and then from the grand-stand witnessed the evolutions of the 
brigades. In the evening there was an exhibition of fireworks, 
after which the excitements and pleasures of the day terminated 
with a grand ball, which was long talked of as one of the most 
noted of New Jersey's social events. 

One of the guests for whom all this display had been prepared 
was unable to be present. Don Juan de Miralles, the Spanish 
envoy, on this all-important day was tossing with fever in one of 
the upper chambers of the Ford mansion. He grew rapidly 
worse, and four days later, to the great consternation and regret 
of his hosts, died. His funeral on the following day was literally 
attended by thousands of persons, the procession of soldiers and 
civilians on foot, which included General Washington and several 
members of congress, extended for a mile. While the funeral 
cortege with its vast escort moved, with solemn slowness to the 
music of muffled drums, from headquarters to the Presbyterian 
burying-ground, minute guns were fired, and every military honor 
accorded to the remains of the distinguished stranger. A Span- 
ish priest recited the Roman Catholic service for the dead at the 
grave, the details of the burial being attended with much pomp 
and ceremony. Lest some predatory soldier should be tempted 
to dig for hidden treasure a guard was left in the churchyard. This 
was considered necessary because of the Spanish dignitary hav- 
ing been buried in full regalia. He was arrayed for interment 
in a scarlet coat embroidered with heavy gold lace ; a three-cor- 
nered gold-laced hat and a well curled wig were on his head, and 
a costly gold watch, set with diamonds, in his pocket ; diamond 
rings were on his fingers, and several rich seals depended from 
his watch guard. Surgeon Thacher recites that the body was 
laid out in a coffin covered with rich black velvet ornamented in 
a superb manner. This leads one to wonder where in so short a 
space of time such burial magnificence could have been procured. 

It is not surprising that the soldiers should have inwardly 
))rotested against so much of value being placed under ground 
with the dead, when live men, serving their country, were in 
sorest need of the merest necessities. Although the response 
anade by the citizens in January to Washington's appeal had 



Sufferings of the Army at Morristown. 519 

saved the army from the immediate danger of starving or dis- 
banding, it had very far from ended the sufferings of the sol- 
diers. Throughout the winter and spring the privations and 
want almost equalled the unhappy experiences of the memorable 
encampment at Valley Forge. For weeks the men were on half 
rations, often without meat, often without bread, much of the 
time nearly frozen for need of blankets and clothing. Fre- 
quently the horses were destitute of forage, and the hospital had 
neither sugar, coffee, tea, wine nor liquors. The military chest 
was empty and the army was unpaid for five months ; even 
when the soldiers received their pay, owing to the diminished 
value of government money it was of but little avail. As previously 
mentioned a memorial of a few months before from the Jersey line 
to the legislature showed that four months' pay of a private would 
not procure a bushel of wheat, that the pay of a colonel would not 
keep his horse in oats, and that a common laborer, whose wages 
were in hard money, received four times as much as an Ameri- 
can officer. The memorial further urged, " that unless a speedy 
and ample remedy was provided the total dissolution of their 
line was inevitable," and in conclusion it said, ^^ that their pay 
should either be made up in Mexican dollars or in something 
equivalent." 

Under such a tide of misfortunes it speaks well for the disci- 
pline and temper of the men that they, when so destitute of 
every comfort, neither inaugurated a war of plunder on the 
inhabitants nor deserted to the enemy. At this time the Ameri- 
can camp was flooded with circulars calling upon the men to fly 
from sickness, famine, and nakedness to the British army, where 
they would be received with open arms, and fed, clothed, and 
paid. Upon Washington fell the embarrassments and responsi- 
bilities of this time. The citizens looked upon him as their 
protector from the marauding of an impoverished and a fam- 
ished soldiery, while the army relied upon him for provisions. 
To satisfy both was no small undertaking ; but Washington 
seemed equal even to such an emergency. He not only guarded 
the interests of the inhabitants but retained the army in service, 
and preserved the affections of his soldiers. To seciu'e order 
and subordination great firmness was necessary, and sometimes 
he was forced to resort to severe punishments. One unhappy 



520 The Story of an Old Farm. 

day in May eight soldiers, who had been court-martialed for 
thievery, desertion, and other crimes, were brought in carts to 
the gallows for execution. After being addressed by the chap- 
lain as to the wickedness of their lives and the justice of their 
sentences, they were placed under the fatal beam on one scaf- 
fold, halters about their necks, their coffins on the ground before 
them, and their open graves in plain view. When the con- 
demned with their eyes bandaged were groaning and appealing 
to Heaven in their extremity, and the thousands of spectators 
stood in awe-stricken expectation of momentarily beholding 
their final agonies, an officer suddenly rode forward and read 
the commander-in-chief's reprieve of seven of the culprits. It 
would be impossible to describe the emotion of the pardoned ; 
weak and agitated by the excitements of the occasion, it was 
almost necessary to carry them from the scaffold. After they 
had somewhat recovered, the chaplain urged them to remember 
the awful fate they had escaped by the clemency of the general, 
and begged that their future lives might in consequence be 
devoted to a faithful discharge of duty. 

The one poor wretch remaining to be executed was a brave 
fellow, and^ before starting on his journey alone, addressed the 
soldiers, urging them to take warning by his fate and to be true 
to their duties and country. The offense for which he suffered 
was that of forging discharges, whereby he and over one hun- 
dred men had escaped from service. When the fatal moment 
had arrived he placed the noose about his neck, himself, and. 
adjusted the knot, at the same time protesting that the halter was 
not strong enough to bear his weight. When swung off, the 
rope broke and the unhappy man was dashed on the ground and 
much bruised. On mounting the scaffold again he cried out : — 
" I told you the rope was not strong enough, do get a stronger 
one !" A new halter was procured, and upon a second attempt 
being made he was successfully launched into eternity. The 
admonition of the chaplain had no effect upon one of the re- 
prieved soldiers, for on the sixteenth of June the hardened 
wretch was himg for deserting to the enemy. 

And so, with the varied experiences of happiness and misery, 
incidental to camp as well as to ordinary life, the spring wore 
on to early summer. In May the entire continental troops con- 



Von Knyphausen Enters New Jersey in 1780. 521 

sisted of seven thousand men, while in June Washington had 
but thirty-seven hundred and fifty with him at Morristown. 
This did not inckide Maxwell's Jersey brigade, which lay at 
Elizabethtown, and the militia, a considerable body of which was 
at the same place, under Colonel Dayton. During the winter 
Sir Henry Clinton, leaving von Knyphausen in command at New 
York, sailed southward with a large detachment of troops, and 
invested Charleston. After a prolonged defence, on the eleventh 
of May the garrison of three thousand under General Lincoln 
capitulated to a British force of nine thousand men. Including 
the adult inhabitants of the city the enemy secured five thous- 
and prisoners, among them seven generals and two hundred and 
thirty-eight other officers. It was a severe blow to the Ameri- 
» can arms and added much to the depression of the public mind. 
Owing to this loss, and to the discontent of Washington's army 
because of the lack of clothing and pay, the British were led to 
believe that the whole country, including citizens and troops, 
would welcome the royal standard, and, provided they felt sure 
of English support, would again give their fealty to the Crown. 
In order to foster this feeling and encourage disaffection the 
enemy landed in force on the sixth of June at Elizabethtown- 
point, intending to penetrate in the direction of Morristown. 
The invading troops were six thousand strong, composed of three 
divisions under Generals Sterling, Matthews and Tryon, with 
von Knyphausen in command. The column took up its line of 
march early on the morning of Wednesday the seventh, moving 
in closed ranks down what is now Elizabeth avenue. It was the 
flower of the British army, the celebrated Coldstream Guards 
being in one of the divisions. An eye-witness thus describes 
their appearance : — 

In the van marched a squadron of dragoons, known as the Queen's Rangers, 
with drawn swords and glittering helmets, mounted on very large and beautiful 
horses. Then followed the infantry composed of English and Hessian troops, 
and every man, horsemen and foot, clad in new uniforms, complete in panoply, 
and gorgeous with burnished brass and polished steel. 

This eye witness was in error as to the dragoons in the van 
being the " Queen's Rangers " — they were the " Queen's Own '* 
— the same command to which Harcourt's troopers that captured 
General Lee belonged. The Rangers wore three-cornered 



522 The Story of an Old Farm. 

braided hats, but the " Queen's Own " were distinctive as 
being arrayed in polished helmets and rich uniforms. 

Von Knjphausen expected to be met with open arms. Nor 
was he disappointed — at least not in fact, though perhaps in 
kind. His men were not fairly on the march before arms 
opened to them on every side. When the head of the column 
moving towards Elizabethtown reached where the Old and New 
Point roads divide, a small guard of militia fired and fled. Gen- 
eral Sterling, who led the first division, was unhorsed and his 
thigh fractured. Just at sunrise the advance turned north into 
Broad street, filing again to the Avest on what is now Jersey 
street. Marching down this then country road the foreign host 
crossed the present line of the Central railroad at where is now 
El Mora station, and so proceeded in good order by way of the 
Galloping Hill road to Connecticut Farms. 

The welcome that the marching column received was a very dif- 
ferent one from what had been anticipated. Puffs of smoke and the 
spatter of bullets greeted the soldiers from trees and hedges, and 
the citizens seemed relentlessly alert, ready to make targets of 
English grenadiers or of Hessian horse and foot. The conduct of 
the iSew Jersey militia was magnificent. General Irvine, in speak- 
ing of them in a letter to his wife on the eighteenth of June, said 
that they " not only turn out, but fight and die bravely defend- 
ing their families." Soon the invading force was fearfully galled 
and so angered as to be ready to wreak vengeance on all things 
animate and inanimate. Dwellings, church, and people alike fell 
a prey to the frenzied soldiers ; even a weak and unoffending 
woman was not safe from their vengeful slaughter. When the 
troops passed the parsonage at Connecticut Farms a red-coat 
jumped over the fence, and pointing his gun in an open window, 
fired two balls through the body of the wife of the Reverend 
James Caldwell, of the first Presbyterian church at Elizabeth- 
town, stretching her dead on the floor. Mr. Caldwell had moved 
his family to the village, thinking that retired spot to be more 
secure from chance incursions of the enemy. The brutal murder 
of this estimable lady, who was the mother of nine little children, 
caused a great cry of horror to go up from the entire country, 
and served to greatly increase the feeling of hatred toward 
everything British. 



Connecticut Farms and Springfield. 523 

The flames ignited by the invaders soon licked up this little 
Tillage, including the church of the Presbyterian congregation, 
which had stood since 1730 as the first offshoot of the Elizabeth- 
town church. When von Knyphausen crossed from Staten 
Island, the previous day. Maxwell with his brigade was at Eliza- 
bethtown, but on the landing of the enemy he retired to Connec- 
ticut Farms. At the same time notice of the enemy's approach 
was sent to Washington. Colonel Dayton had established a 
system of fleet-footed scouts, who, running rapidly one to the 
other, were able to quickly convey intelligence to Morristown. 
Clayton, in his " History of Union County," says that Mrs. 
Elizabeth Sayre, who died in 1850 in her ninety-second year, 
used to tell in her old age of having entertained, refreshed and 
comforted these weary runners in their hurried flight across the 
state ; her homestead, on the corner of the Deanstown road in 
the valley below the Short Hills, is still standing. Wash- 
ington, being thus apprised of the British movement, was 
early on the march, and late in the afternoon reinforced Max- 
well. But during the day the Jersey brigade and the militia 
opposed the enemy with great stubbornness ; first in the vicinity 
of the Farm's meeting-house, where they checked their advance 
for nearly three hours. The Americans then fell back slowly in 
the direction of Springfield, when a stand was made, an action 
following, which Maxwell, in a letter to '' His Excellency Gov- 
ernor Livingston," characterized as the closest he had seen during 
the war. To quote from the general's letter : — 

Never did troops, either continental or militia, behave better than ours did. 
Every one that liad an opportunity — whicli they mostly all had — vied with each 
other who could serve the country most. In the latter part of the day the 
militia flocked from all quarters, and gave the enemy no respite till night closed 
the scene. At the middle of the night the enemy sngaked off and put their 
backsides to the Sound near Elizabethtown. 

The doughty commandant of the Jersey line, in addressing 
^' His Excellenc}'," was not very choice in his language, but he 
fully explained the situation. Early in the day the British had 
learned that the royal standard was not to be a talisman with 
which to convert disloyalty into loyalty. The object of the 
expedition was plainly not to be attained, and, although wagons 
containing seven days' provisions had acc<mipanied the march, it 



524 Thi-: Story of an Old Farm. 

was decided, after learning of Washington's coming up, to 
retreat to Elizabethtown. This was done under cover of the night, 
while the Americans lay on their arms expecting an engage- 
ment in tlie morning. 

When the American army marched to Connecticut Farms in 
support of Maxwell, Mrs. Washington was left at Morristown 
with a temporary guard, commanded by Captain John Steele. 
This officer was a Pennsylvanian who, though but twenty-one 
years old, was already gray, due to the fact of his having laid 
for a long time on the field of Brandywine, far spent with loss 
of blood from a wound in his shoulder. His recovery was 
despaired of for many months, and when convalescent his hair 
blanched and his face failed to regain the ruddy hue of health. 
On the fourteenth of June, in a letter to his brother regarding 
his temporary command, he wrote : — 

I am happy in the importance of my charge as well as in the presence of the 
most amiable woman on earth, whose character should I attempt to describe, I 
could not do justice to, but will only say that I think it unexceptionable. 

One night during Washington's absence there was an alarm, 
and four members of congress, who were in camp in order to learn 
the needs of the army, joined Captain Steele's detachment as 
volunteers. In speaking of them, in his letter, the young officer 
expressed a wish that he had a company of congressmen for the 
next campaign, as it would surely result in the array's being bet- 
ter victualled ; — to quote him : — 

The rations they have consumed considerably overbalanced all their services 
done as volunteers, for they have dined with usevery day since, almost, and drank 
as much wine as they would earn in six montiis. 

Von Knyphausen with his royal detachment did not recross to 
Staten Island but remained behind intrenchments at the Point. 
While there, Sir Henry Clinton returned from the South ; elated 
by his success at Charleston he determined to reinforce the Hes- 
sian general, and again endeavor to beat up the Americans' base 
of supplies at Morristown. To ensure success he first made a 
feint northward in order to draw Washington from New Jersey. 
This ruse was successful. The American general suspecting a 
design against West Point moved his army on the twenty-first in 
that direction, leaving Greene with two brigades to protect the 
stores, and support Maxwell in guarding the lower country. At 



The British Bukn Springfield. 525 

five o'clock on the morning of the twenty-third the enemy 
advanced from Elizabethto^\^l, their numbers increased by a large 
body of cavalry and fifteen or twenty pieces of artillery. They 
moved rapidly in two columns, though considerably harrassed by 
Lee's legion and the militia. Greene, collecting all his available 
troops at Springfield, there met the enemy and opposed their 
march with great spirit. The British manceuvered for two hours 
in a futile effort to flank their opponents, after which a general 
action ensued lasting about forty minutes, when, as Grreene says 
in his report of the operations of the day, ''superior numbers 
overcame obstinate bravery, and forced our troops to retire." 
The American general fell back to the first range of hills where 
he advantageously posted himself so as to check any effort of his 
foes to gain the heights. The British showed no disposition to 
advance further but contented themselves with wasting and ravag- 
ing the country. In a few hours four houses were all that was 
left of what had been the flourishing village of Springfield ; two 
of them, as I am informed, are still preserved as mementoes of 
that exciting and unhappy day. One, the Jonathan Dayton house, 
bears the scars of war in the shape of a hole made by a cannon 
ball ; the other is the second house east of the church and was 
at one time the residence of Abraham Clark, a signer of the 
Declaration of Independence. 

Thus ended the last pitched battle of the Revolution on 
New Jersey soil. The honors remained with the Americans — 
the dishonors and greatest loss of men with the British. Testi- 
mony is universal as to the good order and discipline displayed 
by the soldiers of the republic, and Washington in his report to 
congress pays another of his many tributes to the Jersey militia, 
by saying : " They flew to arms universally, and acted with a 
spirit equal to anything I have seen during the war." The 
British fell back early in the day, their line of retreat being 
marked by dead and wounded men ; the militia were on their 
rear and flanks for the entire distance, keeping up a continuous 
fire upon them until they reached Elizabethtown, at sunset. At 
midnight the enemy evacuated the state, removing their pontoon 
bridge ; and so ended another of their many varied and calami- 
tous misadventures in New Jersey. 
^^The departure of the British was followed by the breaking up 



526 The Story of an Old Farm. 

of the camp on Kimball Hill. Among the stories preserved of that 
time is one illustrative of the spirit displayed by farmer Wicks' 
daughter, Tempe, on the occasion of a sudden and unexpected 
emergency. This young woman was a fearless rider, and the 
owner of a valuable saddle-horse. When the regiments were on 
the move some soldiers attempted to steal her favorite, claiming 
him to be wanted for arm}' purposes. Horses being scarce were 
much needed, and this spirited animal, even were this not so, 
would have been a tempting bait for careless campaigners not 
over-particular as to the rights of property. Miss Wicks, when 
mounted and a short distance from home, was surrounded ; but 
with a bold dash she escaped from her captors and rode rapidly 
up the hill to the house. Springing to the ground she led her 
steed through the kitchen and parlor into a rear spare bed- 
room, which had but one window guarded by a closed wooden 
shutter. The disappointed soldiers repeatedly searched the 
farm in vain for the coveted horse, but the courageous young lady 
kept him secreted in the house until the last of the troops had 
left the neighborhood. Miss Wicks afterwards married Captain 
William Tuttle, of the 3d New Jersey regiment. 

The rest of the year wore away without much advantage to 
the American cause. The surrender at Charleston was supple- 
mented by the reverse at Camden, where Gates lost much of the 
prestige gained at Saratoga. With an empty military chest, a 
barren commissariat and an army in need of almost everything 
it was impossible for Washington to engage in an active cam- 
paign. The best that could be done was to present a bold front 
north of New York city and watch the enemy. On the tenth of 
July, to the great joy of the country, the long expected succor 
from France reached our shores. On that day a French fleet, 
with six thousand troops under the command of Lieutenant- 
General Count de Rochambeau, arrived at Rhode Island. The 
expectations of the Americans were raised to the highest pitch, 
as it was supposed that the cooperating armies would now be 
able to strike a decisive blow. All such hopes were blasted by 
the arrival of a superior British fleet which blockaded the French 
ships and army at Rhode Island, incapacitating the allies for the 
time being from aiding the Americans. And so the cam- 
paign of 1780 early closed in chagrin and disappointment. 



The Year 1780 Closes in Gloom. 



527 



The gloom of this period was further darkened by the black 
treachery of Benedict Arnold, which resulted in the necessary 
sacrifice of that handsome and gifted youth, Major Andre — a 
tragedy which brought honest grief to both armies. 




CHAPTER XXXV. 

The Mutinies of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Lines in 1781 
— The French Army in Somerset on the Way to Virginia — 
TJte Hanging of Captain Joshua Huddy and the Case of 
Captain Asgill. 

The next twelve months will see the end of campaigning in 
Somerset county, and we shall then be able to turn our attention 
in other directions than in that of following the line of march of 
columns of soldiers. Wherever the continentals may drift before 
finally disbanding we may be sure that their route wOl lay amid 
no pleasanter bits of landscape that when they were trailing along 
the highways and by-ways of Morris and Bedminster. 

At the end of November the army was in winter quarters, 
Washington establishing himself at New Windsor on the Hud- 
soil, where the eastern troops were cantoned. The French con- 
tinued at Newport, excepting Lauzun's legion which was sta- 
tioned at Lebanon, Connecticut. The New Jersey and Pennsyl- 
vania lines were in our state ; the former at Pompton, the latter 
on Kimball Hill, near Morristown, both being under the command 
of General Anthony Wayne. This officer, in writing on the 
sixth of December from '^ Mount Kemble" to General Irvine, 
says : — 

We arrived here the 30th ultimo and found a very great proportion of the 
Hutts destroyed, but by collecting the materials still left on the ground occupied 
by Gen. Hand's Brigade and improving those of his yet standing, we shall get 
under cover during the week. 

In another letter Wayne writes : — 

The men are poorly clothed, badly fed, and worse paid, some of them not hav- 
ing received a paper dollar for near twelve months ; exposed to winter's pierc- 
ing cold, to drifting snows, and chilling blasts, with no protection but old worn- 
out coats, tattered linen overalls, and but one blanket between three men. 



The Mutiny on Kimball Hill. 529 

What wonder that such sufferings should have fomented in 
the troops a feeling of discontent and bitterness? Another cause 
for dissatisfaction was a disagreement that had arisen between 
the officers and men as to the true interpretation of the phrase- 
ology of the enlistment papers. By them the men were bound 
to serve for '^ three years or during the war." Those who had 
been in the army over three years claimed that their ser- 
vices were being prolonged beyond the term of enlistment — con- 
tending that the election was with them whether to remain at 
the end of that time. The officers maintained that the alter- 
native was with the government, and that the war not having 
ended the men could be held until the cessation of hostilities. 

The feeling of discontent bred by such a condition of affairs 
rapidly increased, until on the night of the first of January it 
resulted in an open revolt. The men of several regiments 
refused- longer to obey their officers, and declared the intention of 
marching at once to Philadelphia to demand of congress the 
redress of their grievances. A vain attempt was made to arrest 
their departure ; coercion only resulted in a spread of the 
mutiny. Shots were fired on both sides, wounds inflicted, and 
several of the insurgents killed. They in their turn gave a 
death-wound to a Captain Billings, who was endeavoring to 
bring them under subjection. A black-oak tree on the side of 
the Jockey Hollow road, which runs over Kimball Hill east of 
the Wick's house, is still pointed out as the spot where this offi- 
cer was shot by the rebels. He was buried where he fell. 
General Wayne found himself powerless to quell the mutiny. 
With a cocked pistol in his hand he exhorted his men to return 
to their duty, threatening that a failure to do so would entail the 
direst punishments. They replied through their spokesman with 
great firmness, saying: — "We love and respect you, but you are 
a dead man if you fire. Do not mistake us ; we are not going to 
the enemy ; were they now to come out you would see us fight 
under your orders with as much resolution and alacrity as ever." 
Just before midnight the mutineers, thirteen hundred strong, 
armed and under command of their non-commissioned officers, 
set off in good order from camp taking with them six field pieces 
and an adequate number of artillery horses. 

Bad news travels quickly. By the next morning the people 
34 



530 The Story of an Old Farm. 

of Bedminster and the surrounding country knew that the army- 
was in revolt, and much anxiety was felt lest the soldiers should 
commit excesses during their march southward. Nor were their 
fears without reason, but happily this danger was averted by the 
sagacity of Wayne. This general, upon consultation with his offi- 
cers after the rebels had started, determined that if he could not 
command his men he would at least follow in their wake, and 
by judicious management and by seeing that they were sup- 
plied with provisions prevent plundering and depredation. In 
the morning, accompanied by regimental Colonels Stewart and 
Butler, he overtook the insurgents bivouacked at Vealtown and 
immediately had an interview with the non-commissioned offi- 
cers. This resulted in a committee of the sergeants being 
appointed, who drew up a specification of grievances and who 
made the most solemn promises to preserve good order during 
the march. Wayne dispatched couriers to Philadelphia announc- 
ing the unfortunate condition of affairs, and urging that congress 
be prepared to treat with the men. Whereupon a committee 
from that body was appointed, which with President Reed at its 
head proceeded to Princeton, where the insurgents were met and 
negotiations were at once entered into for an accommodation of 
all differences. 

The tories were prompt to carry intelligence of this insurrection 
to the enemy, who falsely concluded that it would be the desire of 
the insurgents to make their way to the British lines. Acting on 
this supposition Sir Henry Clinton collected a number of boats 
opposite Perth Amboy, and dispatched five thousand troops to the 
lower end of Staten Island. He then sent a New Jersey tory named 
Ogden and a British sergeant to the rebels, telling what arrange- 
ments had been made in support of their movement, and offering 
to discharge all debts due them from the United States without 
demanding military service in return. The board of sergeants 
to whom the propositions were made immediately turned the 
bearers, together with their papers, over to Wayne, and eventu- 
ally these emissaries were hung as spies. The soldiers were 
indignant that their loyalty to the government was suspected ; 
"See, comrades," said one of the sergeants, on reading aloud 
Clinton's message, "he takes us for traitors ! Let us show him 
that the American army can furnish but one Arnold, and that 



The Jersey Brigade Mutiny. 531 

America has no truer friends than we." Such a spirit on the 
part of the men had a powerful influence in securing for them a 
favorable adjustment of their difficulties. A compromise mutually 
advantageous was effected, whereby some of their just demands 
were complied with and many of the soldiers were discharged, 
their places in the Pennsylvania line being filled by recruits in 
the spring. So most fortunately terminated an affair which, had 
it been managed on both sides with less discretion, might have 
led to the disruption of the entire army. 

So great a breach of discipline was not without its evil effects 
upon other portions of the continental force. In the middle of Jan- 
uary some of the Jersey line at Porapton, encouraged by the suc- 
cess of the Pennsylvanians, refused longer to do duty. Washing- 
ton fearing further trouble had already taken the precaution of 
having a trusted command of one thousand men under arms, ready 
to march from headquarters at a moment's notice. This detachment 
made a rapid move on the Jersey camp, when the refractory 
soldiers were forced to parade without arms and deliver up their 
ringleaders. Three of the latter, who had been at the head of 
the revolt, were at once tried by drum-head court-martial, sen- 
tenced, and two of them executed on the spot, twelve of the most 
guilty of their associates being obliged to serve as the firing 
party. In such a terrible but effective manner was this second 
mutiny throttled at its birth. It seems severe measures to have 
meted out to our Jersey soldiers when the Pennsylvania line 
had been dealt with so leniently, but it must be remembered that 
the latter were in force, that they were in excellent temper, and 
that the government was taken imawares and obliged to meet th^ 
difficulty as best it coidd. This last insurrection, however, found 
Washington prepared to cope with the exigency ; it was absolute- 
ly necessary to nip this second attempt in the bud, for had it pre- 
vailed it would have meant the utter destruction of the army. 

The next incident of interest in the Revolutionary story of 
Somerset is the memorable march of the allied armies across the 
county on their way to the triumphant campaign in Virginia. 
When Sir Henry Clinton returned in June, 1780, from his suc- 
cess at Charleston, he left at that place four thousand men under 
Lord Cornwallis. After the capture of Lincoln no continentf 1 
force remained south of Pennsylvania. To fill this void the 



532 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Maryland and Delaware troops were despatched southward under 
the command of DeKalb, whose troops also included militia from 
both the Carolinas ; he was soon succeeded by Gates. The latter 
general's campaign ended with the disaster at Camden, and on 
the thirtieth of October he retired in favor of Greene, who was 
transferred from the quartermaster's department to the command 
of the Southern army. 

The achievements of this able general produced a marked 
change in the aspect of affairs, for with an inconsiderable and 
miserably provided army he successfully contended with a 
regular British force, his efforts culminating in the brilliant vic- 
tories of Cowpens and Eutaw Springs. Before the first of April, 
with alternate marching and fighting, the opposing armies had 
crossed the two Carolinas, and Cornwallis had entered Virginia. 
By this time the British general had been largely reinforced and 
had divided his command. At the Virginia line Greene aban- 
doned the pursuit of Cornwallis and turned back to meet the 
other division. The Earl continued to Winchester, and to Peters- 
burg where he combined with General Philips, and being there 
further reinforced by fifteen hundred men from New York he found 
himself at the head of a formidable array, seven thousand strong. 
He advanced from Petersburg, opposed guardedly by Lafayette, 
who in February, 1781, had marched to Virginia with twelve hun- 
dred men to operate against Arnold, that traitor having been for 
some months conducting a predatory warfare in that state. This 
force of the marquis was formed into three battalions. One of 
them was composed of light-infantry companies detailed from 
the New Jersey line, consisting of thirteen officers and one hun- 
ured and forty-eight enlisted men, with Lieutenant-Colonel 
Francis Barber at their head. Lafayette declared his light- 
infantry to be the best troops that had ever taken the field, 
and that an equal number of British never ventured to meet 
them. Stryker, in his monograph on the Virginia campaign, 
affirms that this splendid New Jersey command bore a conspicu- 
ous and honorable part throughout all the movements that cul- 
minated in the fall of Yorktown. 

Colonel Barber at the outset of the war was the master of an 
Elizabethtown grammar-school, but his patriotism soon carried 
him into the army, -and being naturally a student he rapidly 



Lafayette in Somerset County. 533 

acquired a knowledge of the art of war. At different times he 
served with distinction on the staffs of Sullivan, Stirling, Greene 
and Steuben, and during the struggle was distinguished for 
bravery and ability ; notably in the famous assault on the redoubts 
of Yorktown, when his light-infantry acted as a supporting col- 
umn. With the strange irony of fate, Colonel Barber, after 
passing nearly unscathed through the many dangers of the pro- 
longed Revolutionary contest, was accidentally killed in 1783, 
just eight days before the announcement of the cessation of hos- 
tilities. While riding from camp to his quarters, near New 
Windsor on the Hudson, on the eleventh of February, a tree 
suddenly fell across his path striking him dead from his horse. 

The passage of Lafayette's little army across New Jersey, on 
its way to Virginia, was the most rapid movement of troops 
chronicled during the war. Although the roads were deep with 
mud but two days were consumed in marching from Morris- 
town to Princeton. He was at Pompton on the twenty-third of 
February and embarked at Trenton on the first of March, reach- 
ing the Head of Elk on the third. Messengers had been sent ahead 
to notify the New Jersey people of Lafayette's proposed rapid 
march, and the citizens cheerfully aided the progress of the 
detachment. Its commandant wrote Washington that when- 
ever he halted his troops he found wood and cover in waiting, 
and not the least complaint had been made by the inhabitants. 
During the spring the marquis had been reinforced by Steuben 
with Virginia militia and by Wayne with Pennsylvania regu- 
lars. Cornwallis, deciding to make Virginia the seat of future 
operations, proceeded to Yorktown, where he strongly fortified 
himself and awaited the arrival of a British fleet from the West 
Indies, , by which help he hoped to prosecute a vigorous cam- 
paign. All this time Washington was not unmindful of what 
was transpiring in the south. Knowing that a French fleet 
would soon arrive at the Virginia capes, he believed that he saw 
an opportunity in conjunction with the allied army for striking a 
deadly blow at the enemy. His preparations accordingly were 
secretly and effectively made. 

During the entire summer of 1781 the British garrison and 
tory residents of New York city were in constant trepidati.)n 
because of the proximity of the combined American and French 



534 The Story of an Old Farm. 

forces. Early in July Washington's array was encamped at 
Dobb's Ferry, and by the sixth of that month he was reinforced 
by Rochambeau from Newport. The enemy had good cause for 
fearing an immediate attack and Clinton had grave doubts of 
the favorable results of an encounter, his force having been 
much weakened by drafts on him from Cornwallis. Washington 
was well informed of the fears and apprehensions of the British 
general, and, by a series of feints and movements, did what he 
could to add to his discomfitures and to prolong his anxieties. 
Clinton learned from his spies and scouts that on the twenty- 
second of July the Americans and French, five thousand strong, 
were marching and countermarching on the heights north of 
Harlem, that on the twenty-third Washington and Rochambeau 
dined at the Van Courtland mansion at King's Bridge, and that 
a few days later they were reconnoitering in the vicinity of the 
British outposts. 

Washington and his leading generals kept their own counsels, 
and the continental officers, generally, were as curious as were 
the English as to what was to be the outcome of the many pre- 
parations being made within the American lines. Camps were 
established, earth works were thrown up, bread-ovens erected, 
and much else done by order of the commander-in-chief calcu- 
lated to alarm the enemy and deceive his own army. Mean- 
while the position of Cornwallis in Virginia was growing perilous 
in the extreme. Though Clinton had nearly eighteen thousand 
men on and about Manhattan Island, while menaced by Washing- 
ton he dared not detach a single company to reinforce the south- 
ern army. This explains the American general's masterly 
manoeuvres. He was biding his time. When the news came 
that Count de G-rasse, with twenty-eight ships of the line carry- 
ing four thousand soldiers, had entered the Chesapeake he 
showed his hand — at least to his own force. On the nineteenth 
of August small detachments were sent against New York and 
Staten Island to occupy the enemy, while the main allied array 
broke camp, crossed the Hudson, and hastily marched southward. 
So sudden and unannounced was this movement that the armies 
were well on their way through New Jersey before the oflicers 
learned that they were bound for Virginia. It was for a long 
time controverted whether Washington had really intended a 



The Allied Armies in New Jersey. 535 

stroke at New York, and whether it was the opportune informa- 
tion that Count de Grasse was approaching the Delaware capes 
that fixed his determination to attack the enemy in Virginia, as 
heing a more vulnerable quarter. All doubts on this score were 
set at rest in 1788 by a letter from Washington, published in 
'*' Carey's Museum," in which an explicit statement was made 
that : — 

It never was in contemplation to attack New York, unless the garrison should 
first have been so far degarnished to carry on the southern operations as to ren- 
der our success in the siege of that place as infallible as any future military event 
can ever be made. * * * that much trouble was taken and finesse used to 
misguide and bewilder Sir Henry Clinton in regard to the real object is certain ; 
nor were less pains taken to deceive our own army, for I had always conceived, 
•where the imposition does not completely take place at home it would never suf- 
ficiently succeed abroad. 

The allied armies in crossing New Jersey marched by differ- 
ent routes in four divisions, two American and two French. 
The right column of the continentals, composed of Hazen's regi- 
ment, the corps of sappers and miners, the artillery, stores, bag- 
gage and thirty flatboats on carriages, passed through northern 
Somerset on the twenty-eighth, marching on that day from Chat- 
ham to Bound Brook. On the night of the thirtieth this divi- 
sion encamped at Princeton, and on the following day was at 
Trenton where the heavy ordnance, baggage, stores and a por- 
tion of the troops were embarked for Philadelphia. The Ameri- 
can left column, under Major-General Lincoln, comprised the 
light-infantry commanded by Colonel Scammell in the van, the 
two New York regiments under Brigadier-General Clinton on the 
left, and the Jersey brigade and the Rhode Island regiments in 
the centre. This division separated from the right at Chatham 
on the twenty-eighth, joining it again on the thirty-first at Tren- 
ton, having marched by the way of New Brunswick and Prince- 
ton. An old order book of the light-infantry, now before me, 
presents some interesting glimpses of the experiences of this left 
column while on the march. Assembly was beat each morning 
at half after three and the troops were in motion at four. The 
column was preceded by the commissaries with a drove of cattle, 
who, on reaching the place of encampment for the night, 
slaughtered the necessary stock and had the rations of beef 
ready to be issued on the arrival of the troops. Brigade-com- 



536 The Story of an Old Farm. 

manders were ordered on reaching camp-ground to make imme- 
diate application to the commissary for fresh beef, "and if it was 
not killed and ready to serve out They are to demand the Rea- 
son and report it." Each regiment was allowed one uncovered 
and three covered wagons for carrying baggage and tents, which, 
were ordered to fall in between the New York brigade and the 
rear-guard. In addition two empty wagons followed each 
brigade in which were placed men too sick or lame to 
march. Wagoners who permitted such persons to ride with- 
out written permission from the corps commanders were to 
be punished at the first halt. The women contingent of this 
force appear to have caused considerable annoyance. They were 
inclined to steal rides from the wagons, and evidently were not 
amenable to military discipline. One of the orders relating to 
them recites : — 

Prior to the cotnaienceraent of our march this morning the commanding offi- 
cers will inform the women of their respective corps that the General saw many 
of them yesterday from their proper line of march, strolling in gardens and orch- 
ards, an irregularity which mnst not be repeated. Should any attempt it here- 
after they will be denied their rations and prevented farther from following the 
army. 

But it was the passage of the French divisions that excited 
the liveliest interest among the Jersey people. The allies' right 
column consisted of Lauzun's legion ; the regiment Bourbonnais, 
uniformed in black turned up with red ; the Royal Deux-Ponts, 
in white broadcloth coats faced with green ; and the heavy 
artillery, the men of which were uniformed in blue with white 
facings. The left column of the French army contained all the 
stores and baggage, together with the regiments Saintonge and. 
Soissonnais, the men of the former being arrayed in white and 
green, while the white uniforms of the latter were faced with 
pink, their grenadier caps being gay with floating pink plumes. 
Attached to each regiment were companies of chasseurs formed 
of light active men, and of grenadiers who were always soldiers of 
good size and appearance. The latter were considered the elite 
ef the corps, being men of long service and acknowledged 
bravery ; they wore high bearskin hats and distinctive uni- 
forms, and always marched at the head of each battalion. 

The two French divisions lay at Whippany on the night of 
the twenty-eighth, where the left column rested on the following 



The French Itinerary in Somerset. 537 

day while the right marched to " Bullion's tavern,"* in Bernards 
township. This first division on the thirtieth pushed on through 
Bedminster and Bridgewater to Somerset Court-house (Mill- 
stone), the second division reaching '' Bullion's tavern " on the 
same night. The next halt of the right column was at Prince- 
ton on the night of the thirty-first, the left occupying the same 
night the camp that the right had vacated in the morning. So the 
two French divisions continued their march one day apart, on 
through Trenton to Philadelphia, which they entered on the 
third and fourth of September, camping one mile beyond the 
city. There has been left us numerous notices of the passage of 
the foreign troops through our county. The Ahhe Bobin, the 
chaplain of the regiment Soissonnais, furnishes us with the 
dates of the halts of his division, and records that the conduct of 
the men was admirable, there not even being a single instance 
of one of the soldiers taking an apple or a peach from an orchard 
without obtaining leave. The Duponceau manuscripts recite : 
" It was given out in general orders that if a Frenchman should 
have a dispute with an American the Frenchman should be pun- 
ished, whether he was in the right or in the wrong." 

The '' Journal of Claude Blanchard," commissary of the French 
army, records many of that officer's impressions of the Somerset 
country. He found the dwellings of Bernards township " always 
unique." He says : — 

They have no gardens, no fruit walls, only some apple trees, some peach trees 
and some scattered cherry trees, all forming what we call orchard. The road 
which I took to reach " Bullion's Tavern " is not disagreeable, but the farms are 
still middling, they were sown with maise and buckwheat ; I also saw a little 
hemp there. 

Princeton seems to have found favor with the commissary, 
which he calls : — 

A pretty village of about siijty houses ; the inns there are handsome and very 
clean. A very handsome college is also to be seen there, built in the same style 
as that at Providence. 



* The location of this tavern, which is often spoken of in Revolutionary itiner- 
aries, has long been in dispute. It has been claimed by Liberty Corner, Basking 
Ridge, and Bernardsville (Veal town). The preponderance of testimony is alto- 
gether in favor of the site of the present tavern at the latter place, opposite the 
" Vealtown Spring." 



538 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Another diarist furnishes us with an interesting account of some 
of the French officers from one of the divisions having been enter- 
tained at John Morton's residence, near the church at Basking 
Ridge. Mrs. Morton's parents, — Mr. and Mrs Kemper — who had 
emigrated from Germany early in the century, were at this time 
visiting their children at Basking Ridge. While all the other 
members of the household were delighted with the appearance of 
the French soldiers, and vied with each other in their entertain- 
ment, the old gentleman and his wife retired to their chamber. 
They could not forget the sufferings of fatherland under Gallic 
oppression, and were confident that no good would come to the 
American cause by the employment of such allies. 

The foreign troops while swinging through Bedminster on 
their hurried march made a magnificent appearance. As soldiers 
the Frenchmen were a revelation to the inhabitants, presenting a 
marked contrast to the poorly clad and equipped continentals. 
The view of such perfect phalanxes, thronging helms and thick 
array of waving banners was a new military experience for Bed- 
minster people, and when the tambour-majors, resplendent in 
panache, aiguillette and tinsel, flourished their ponderous batons, 
making the hills and valleys vocal with the melody of the Gallic 
bands, the acme of warlike splendor seemed to have been 
reached. The private soldiers in their handsome and varied 
uniforms appeared as neat as their officers ; easy, debonair, and 
with natures proverbially gay, they were not stern-looking, grim- 
visaged warriors, as though wielding the off'ensive blade from 
love of carnage, or eager to sack cities and devastate and raze 
villages. But do not for a moment make the mistake of thinking 
that these Frenchmen were mere holiday soldiers. They could 
fight, — and they did fight, like gladiators when the time came. 
On the fourteenth of October one-third of the Regiment Gatenois 
— afterwards the royal Auvergne — which had landed from Count 
de Grasse's fleet, fell in the trenches near Yorktown when storm- 
ing a redoubt. Heavy pockets make light hearts. Perhaps that 
is why the French soldiers bore such cheerful countenances, as 
they were paid regularly every two weeks. They had other 
causes for being contented with their military lot. One James 
Tilton, in a letter from Williamsburg, Virginia, in December, 
1781, to Captain Thomas Rodney of Delaware, wrote : — 



The Duke of Lauzun's Legion. 539 

It must be mortifying for our poor devils to observe the comfortable and happy 
life of French soldiers. They appear on parade every day like fine gentlemen. 
* * * The officers treat the soldiers with attention, humanity and respect, 
and appear to employ all the means necessary to inspire them with sentiments of 
honor. Theft is said to be a crime held in universal abhorrence among them. I 
have not seen or heard of any instance yet of a French soldier being whipped. 
Their desertions, I believe, have been rare, and their sickness but little. When 
will our army bear this comparison ? 

The Jersey people especially marvelled at the brave show- 
made by the Duke of Lauzun's legion, a corps of six hundred 
men, hussars and infantry, the very pick of the French army. 
These soldiers, especially the hussars, were sparkling with life 
and activity and seemed to look upon the march as a holiday 
excursion. Their officers were all tall young men with hand- 
some faces and noble bearings, who made a superb appearance 
mounted on fine horses, richly caparisoned. Their distinctive 
characteristics — which were quite new on this side of the water 
— were the moustaches they all wore. We may easily figure 
the interest and admiration that these volatile, laughter-loving 
beaux sabreurs must have excited in the hearts and minds of the 
American girls met during their campaign. It is said that fol- 
lowing the impulses of their gay dispositions, more than once 
after a day's march their assurance and captivating manners 
secured for them partners for an evening dance. The legion 
had quartered during the winter and spring at Lebanon, Con- 
necticut, where the corps was most hospitably entertained. In 
return, the officers had given many dances and dinners, and 
altogether had endeared themselves to the people of the neigh- 
borhood. 

The Due de Lauzun-Biron was a nobleman of great wealth, 
and celebrated alike for beauty, bravery and wit ; by his pre- 
possessing manners he made himself very agreeable to the 
Americans, those with whom he was intimate always remember- 
ing him with much affection. His career, which in the begin- 
ning gave great promise, came to a tragic end on the last day of 
the year 1793, when he was guillotined at Paris, charged with 
favoring the Vendeans. Two of his officers — brothers by the 
name of Dillon — one, a major, the other, a captain, who had 
made excellent impressions in America, suffered the same fate. 
A violent death was in later years the dire lot of a number of 



540 The Story of an Old Farm. 

the men who officered the French contingent force during the 
Virginia campaign. Among them was Count de Custine — 
otherwise Adam Philipe — who commanded the regiment Sain- 
tonge. On returning to France, after serving with distinction in 
America, although a nobleman he joined the revokitionarj party, 
and in 1792 was at the head of the French army on the lower 
Rhine. His nobility having always made him an object of sus- 
picion, in the following year he was accused of treason, and, 
though protesting to the last his loyalty to the cause, was guillo- 
tined on the twenty-seventh of August. 

The death of another officer was still more at variance with 
the brilliancy of his career. This was that of Count Jean Axel 
de Fersen — a Swede. At the early age of nineteen he went to 
France and was made colonel of the king's Swedish body-guard. 
His singular beauty attracted universal attention, and even the 
queen became so sensible of his fascinations as to expose her- 
self to adverse criticism. It is said that the count's advent in 
America was due to his regard for her majesty's reputation, for 
fearing that her too openly expressed preference for him would 
cause scandal he decided to avoid such a catastrophe by entering 
the military family of Rochambeau as an aide-de-camp. At 
Newport he became a great favorite in society and won the affec- 
tions of all the women. His character as well as his person was 
much admired, and his success with the sex, and with the Ameri- 
cans generally, was the greater because speaking their language. 
He did excellently well at Yorktown, being complimented by 
Washington for his soldierly qualities and conduct. The life of 
this well-favored young officer was strangely full of adventure. 
He it was who, disguised as a coachman, drove Louis XVI and 
Marie Antoinette from Paris to Varennes, on the occasion of 
their unsuccessful attempt to escape from their loving subjects. 
The count met his tragic end in 1810 at Stockholm. He was 
suspected of conniving at the death of the young king, Christian 
Augustus, and was murdered by a mob while attending that 
monarch's funeral. 

The combined armies were quickly beyond the Delaware. It 
was the thirtieth of August — by which time the French and 
American generals were being enthusiastically welcomed at 
Philadelphia — before Sir Henry Clinton, almost wild with anger 



The Fall of Yorktown. 541 

and humiliation, discovered that the British had again been out- 
generaled — that his array was again the victim of the superior 
strategy of the American Fabius. On the eighth of September, 
while Greene was whipping the enemy at Entaw Springs Wash- 
ington was in Baltimore, and on the evening of the ninth he was 
at Mount Vernon — his first visit in six years. Here two days 
were spent in entertaining distinguished guests from the two 
armies. The generals and their retinues on the fourteenth 
joined Lafayette at Williamsburg ; by the twenty-eighth, all the 
divisions of both nations having come up, the combined armies 
moved on Yorktown, and by the fifth of October the place was 
completely invested. Shortly after midnight of the twentieth, 
people living in the vicinity of High and Second streets in Phil- 
adelphia were disturbed by a loud pounding on the front door of 
the dwelling of Thomas McKean, president of congress. It was 
Lieutenant-Colonel Tench Tilghman, who had ridden express 
from General Washington bearing dispatches, announcing that 
on the previous day seven thousand British and German soldiers 
had laid down their arms, and that with them Lord Cornwallis, the 
king of England's ablest general, was a prisoner. Soon, boom- 
ing cannons, clanging bells, and loud-voiced watchmen carried 
the glad news to every quarter of the city. When the morning 
light was breaking, couriers were flying in all directions convey- 
ing intelligence to the country that the darkness was disappearing 
— that Britain had forever loosened its hold on America. 

The fall of Yorktown virtually closed the Revolutionary war. 
Three months had not gone by after the capture of Cornwallis 
became known in London before parliament concluded to aban- 
don offensive operations. Negotiations for peace began at once, 
and continued until the thirtieth of November, 1782, when a 
provisional treaty was signed. Meanwhile a few skirmishes in 
the South, and in Monmouth county. New Jersey, constituted 
about all the active military operations. The one event that 
distinguished the closing year of the war, and in which the peo- 
ple of Somerset were much concerned, was the sad condition of 
a young English officer, who in the autumn of 1782 was con- 
fined in the huts of the Jersey line, in Chatham township, Mor- 
ris county, awaiting execution. It was not only the people of 
Somerset who anxiously interested themselves in the misfortunes 



542 The Story of an Old Farm. 

of this youth. The knowledge of his approaching fate harassed 
congress, disturbed two European courts, and agitated the society 
of London and Paris. His unhappy predicament was brought 
about in this wise. 

Of all the sad Revolutionary chapters contributed by Mon- 
mouth county, none are more dismal than the one narrating the 
tragic death of Captain Joshua Huddy, who was hanged by 
refugee Jerseymen at Gravelly Point, about one mile north of 
the Highland lighthouse and opposite the southerly portion of 
Sandy Hook. Huddy, who was an active patriot, had com- 
manded one of the two batteries of artillery of state troops that 
had been organized by an act of the legislature in 1777. This 
militia captain was especially vigilant in suppressing the incen- 
diary acts of tories and refugees, of whom there were many in 
Monmouth county, where he was stationed. The terror he 
inspired among these people was such as to make him a marked 
man, and the object of their vengeance whenever an opportu- 
nity presented itself. In the summer of 1780, while in his 
house at Colt's Neck, five miles from Freehold, he was attacked 
by sixty men headed by Colonel Tye, a mulatto, who generally 
roamed the country with a mongrel crew of negroes and tories. 
With the exception of a colored servant girl about twenty years 
old Huddy was alone in the house ; but fortunately he had a 
number of muskets belonging to the members of his absent 
guard. Together these two made a brave defence ; the girl 
loaded while he rapidly fired from different windows, giving 
the impression of their being a strong force inside. Several of 
their assailants were wounded, including their leader, who sub- 
sequently died. Finally the house was set on fire, and the cap- 
tain agreed to surrender provided the enemy would suppress the 
flames. Tye's men were greatly exasperated on entering at 
finding so few defenders. As the militia were now collecting, 
they hurriedly put out the fire and carried Huddy off to their 
boats at Black Point on the Navesink river. The troops, which 
were in close pursuit, appeared on the bank soon after the 
refugees had shoved from the shore. A lively fusillade ensued, 
during which Huddy sprang into the river and swam boldly to 
his friends, though reaching them with a bullet in his thigh. 
In the spring of 1782 Captain Huddy commanded twenty-five 



HuDDY Captured at Tom's River. 543 

men who were garrisoning a rude fort, or block-house, which 
stood just north of the bridge at the village of Tom's River in 
Ocean county. This fort was attacked by the enemy, the 
expedition for that purpose being composed of forty refugees 
under the command of Captain Evan Thomas and Lieutenant 
Owen Roberts, of the Bucks county (Pa.) volunteers. They 
embarked at New York on the morning of Wednesday, the 
twentieth of March, on whaleboats manned by Lieutenant 
Blanchard and eighty seamen. It was not until after midnight 
that the entire party landed at Coates Point on the north side of 
Tom's River. They were joined by a detachment of -Ocean 
county refugees commanded by Richard Davenport. Securing 
a guide in one William Dillon, the force stole silently through 
the woods in the direction of the village, and at daylight on Sun- 
day morning suddenly charged the fort. Captain Huddy and 
his men made a gallant defence with swivels, muskets and pikes, 
but the block -house was finally carried by assault after the gar- 
rison had exhausted its ammunition, one-third of the men being 
killed. 

The brave commander was conveyed to New York, and sub- 
sequently to Sandy Hook, where he was confined, heavily 
ironed, in the hold of a guard-ship. Six days after Huddy was 
taken, a refugee named White, a Shrewsbury carpenter, was 
captured by a party of county light-horse. He was placed in 
charge of three men, the father of one of whom had been mur- 
dered the year before by some loyalists, White being of the party. 
The wheel of fortune had made an unhappy revolution for this 
Shrewsbury carpenter. When his guard was relieved he was 
found dead, the explanation being given that he had been shot 
while endeavoring to escape. There is no doubt, however, that 
a son had cruelly avenged the murder of a father. Though this 
occurred after the capture of Huddy, the refugees, eager for a 
pretence whereby his death could be encompassed, charged him 
with being privy to the killing of White. Without listening to 
a defence, or even going through the form of a trial, poor Huddy 
was hurried to Gravelly Point by a band of sixteen loyalists 
under one Captain Lippencott, and there barbarously hanged 
on a gallows hastily formed of three fence-rails and a flour-barrel. 
It is said that he died with extraordinary firmness, and that with 



544 The Story of an Old Fa«m. 

a serene mind and a steady hand he drew up his will on the head 
of the barrel from which, a few moments later, he was forced to 
spring into eternity. His murderers left a label affixed to his 
breast upon which was written an attempted justification of their 
act, ending with : '' Up goes Huddy for Philip White." Richard 
Lippencott, the self-constituted executioner, was a renegade 
Jerseyraan and an officer in a refugee regiment, the King's 
Rangers, whose colonel, Robert Rogers, had preceded Lieuten- 
ant-Colonel Simcoe in the command of the Queen's Rangers. 

This inhuman murder filled the country with indignation, and 
urgent demands were made that immediate punishment should be 
visited upon the murderer. Thereupon the authorities insisted 
that the British commands should deliver up Lippencott, threat- 
ning that, otherwise, one of the English officers in their hands 
must die in his stead. In furtherance of this retaliatory mea- 
sure eight captains and five lieutenants, who were on their 
paroles in Pennsylvania, were directed to report at Lancaster, 
in order that the victim might be selected. They assembled on 
the morning of the twenty -fifth of May in a room of the Black 
Bear tavern, — twenty mounted dragoons waiting in the inn yard 
to bear away the unfortunate who should be chosen. 

In the presence of Brigadier-General Moses Hazen, command- 
ant; his aide, Captain White; Mr. Witz, commissary of prison- 
ers; Major Gordon, a paroled British officer in the charge of 
prisoners; and the dragoon officer, the lots were drawn. The 
names of the thirteen British officers were written on separate 
slips of paper and placed in a hat ; another hat contained thir- 
teen slips of the same size, all blank but one, which was inscribed, 
"unfortunate." Captain White and the commissary held the 
hat while two drummer-boys simultaneously drew the papers. 
When the one was reached on which was written "unfortunate," 
it appeared with a slip containing the name of Captain Asgill of 
the "Foot Guards" who was the youngest officer present; he 
was a youth possessing many graces of mind and person, and 
was of high connections in England. At once, upon the result 
of the drawing being known, the brigadier turned to the dragoon- 
officer, saying, — "This gentleman. Sir, is your prisoner." The 
meeting then broke up, every one in tears excepting the young 
man selected. Major Gordon prevailed upon General Hazen to 



Captain Asgill at Chatham. 545 

delay the departure until Tuesday the twenty-seventh ; on that 
day Asgill and Gordon left Lancaster for Philadelphia, escorted 
by the dragoons. From there the unfortunate British officer was 
sent to the Jersey line at Chatham, the place assigned for his 
execution, and put in charge of Colonel Elias Dayton of the 2d 
New Jersey regiment. Washington wrote the colonel on the 
fourth of June directing him : — 

Treat Captain Asgill with every tenderness and association, and politeness 
consistent with his present situation which his rank, fortune, and connections, 
together with his private state, demands. 

A few days later, Washington, fearing that Dayton was follow- 
ing his instructions too literally, thus wrote him again: — 

Sir, I am informed that Captain Asgill is at Chatham without a guard, and 
under no restraint. This, if true, is certainly wrong ; I wish to have the young 
gentleman treated with all possible tenderness consistent with his present situa- 
tion, but considered as a close prisoner and kept in the greatest security. I 
request, therefore, that he may be sent immediately to the Jersey line where he is 
to be kept close prisoner in perfect security till further orders. 

At first it appeared as if nothing could avert the dire extremity 
of Asgill's execution. Washington was deeply afflicted by the 
unhappy fate menacing the young officer, but, after deliberation, 
his determination had been firmly fixed on retaliation as the only 
means of preventing a continuance of refugee iniquities. The' 
sympathies of America and Europe were aroused in behalf of 
Asgill, who was but little more than a boy. Sir Guy Carleton, 
who had succeeded Sir Henry Clinton in the command of the 
British army, successfully appealed to Washington for delay. 
Later he submitted the result of a court-martial, whereby Lip- 
pencott had been exonerated on the ground that William 
Franklin, ex-colonial governor of New Jersey and the then 
president of the "Board of Associated Loyalists," had given 
verbal orders for the execution of Huddy because, as it was 
claimed, he had been a persecutor of the king's faithful subjects 
in New Jersey. Sir Guy, who was a man of broad views and 
great humanity, broke up this "Board of Loyalists," and in a 
commimication to Washington declared that notwithstanding 
the acquittal of Lippencott he "reprobated the measure," and 
gave assurances of prosecuting a further inquiry. 

Meanwhile the commander-in-chief and congress were besieged 
with communications and memorials praying that the life of the 
35 



546 The Story of an Old Farm. 

proposed victim might be spared. Finally the sympathies and 
good offices of our country's valued allies, the French, were 
enlisted, and Count de Vergennes, representing the court of 
France, made a strong appeal to congress in behalf of clemency. 
In support of this appeal he presented a most tender and pathe- 
tic letter that had been addressed to him by the British officer's 
mother, pleading, as only a mother could plead, that mercy might 
supersede the necessity for retaliation. This, together with the 
prospect of a speedy peace, rendering the motive for avengeraent 
as a preventative of future murder unnecessary, materially 
changed the situation of affairs. 

There was another circumstance that powerfully influenced 
congress and the country in sustaining altered views regarding 
the fate of the young soldier. Washington had been very much 
distressed that General Hazen had been unable to send him for 
purposes of retaliation an officer who was an unconditional pris- 
oner. Asgill was among those who had surrendered with Corn- 
wallis. The fourteenth article of the capitulation expressly 
excluded all the prisoners from liability to be used as hostages in 
subsequent reprisals, and the British Major Gordon on the 
twenty-seventh of May had protested strongly in writing against 
a violation of the terms of surrender. Washington in a letter to 
the secretary of war on the fifth of June acknowledged being 
sorely embarrassed by the possible infringement of the article of 
surrender, and begged that the secretary would transmit to him 
his views, and those of members of congress with whom he had 
talked on the subject. As the days went on, public feeling grew 
stronger that, even if poor Huddy was unavenged, good faith 
demanded that retaliation should not be visited on the British 
in the person of Captain Asgill. So, altogether, it began to 
appear as if he was not destined to atone for the death of the 
American captain. 

On the twenty-fifth of August General Washington ordered 
Colonel Dayton to leave his charge on parole at Morristown, 
and on the seventh of November congress, recognizing th6 
altered sentiment of the country, directed that the prisoner 
should be unconditionally set at liberty. And thus, happily, 
historians, in writing of the closing year of the Revolution, have 
not been forced to devote a chapter to the recital of the distress- 
ing details of a final blood reprisal. 



CHAPTER XXXVI. 

Peace — Prostration of the Country After the War— American 
Loyalists and Their Experiences — The Inquisition Against 
William Melich and the Confiscation of His Property. 

Of all the general orders issued by Washington to the army 
during the war, none was received with more profound satisfac- 
tion than the one dated, " Head Quarters, Chatham, April 18th, 
1783," which directed the cessation of hostilities. It further 
ordered that an accompanying proclamation of peace should be 
read the next evening at the head of every regiment of the army, 
after which the brigade chaplains were to render thanks to 
Almighty God for '' over-ruling the wrath of man to his own 
glory, and causing the rage of war to cease among the nations." 
At the same time an extra ration of liquor was to be issued to 
every soldier, to drink " Perpetual peace and happiness to the 
United States of America." 

On the third of September the final treaty of peace was signed 
at Paris, and definite treaties entered into with other comitries, 
whereby the liberty and independence of the United States were 
fully acknowledged, and the country was received among the 
great family of nations. There was nothing left for the patriot 
army to do but to disband. Fm'loughs were freely granted to 
the soldiers, who upon going home were not required to return. 
On the third of November the entire army was discharged, and 
thus a force of nearly ten thousand men were dismissed and dis- 
persed over the states without, with but one exception, tumult or 
disorder. The officers received five years' full pay in money, 
or, at their election, half pay for life. The case of the privates 
was, indeed, hard. The general government found itself power- 



548 The Story of an Old Farm. 

less to procure the necessary funds for paying the large arrear- 
ages due the army. The brave men who had stemmed the tide 
of British oppressions were obliged to content themselves with 
the immediate recompense of four months' pay, and a future 
recompense of promises, well intended but poorly carried out. 
It was at first feared that the distribution throughout the coun- 
try of so many men who had good reasons for grievance would 
cause distiu'bances and lawlessness. Happily the strength of the 
government was not to be tried by such a condition of affairs. 
The army melted quietly away ; and, peaceably laying down 
their arms, the privates, as a rule, betook themselves to honest 
labor, and became absorbed among the farmers, planters and 
mechanics. The one exception to such a pea^..able disposition 
is to be found in the action of the Pennsylvania levies, who in 
the last of Jmie, in defiance of their officers, surrounded the 
State House in Philadelphia, and threatened destruction to con- 
gress unless their demands for redress were immediately grati- 
fied. The national legislature succeeded in escaping from duress 
with dignity and retired to Princeton, convening in Nassau Hall, 
as has been narrated in a previous chapter. 

Our Revolutionary chronicles are now ended. War — ruthless 
war — with its attendant horrors, no longer stalks over the land, 
sowing broadcast discord, hatred and vengeance, and trampling 
under foot human aff'ections and the happiness of communities. 
In its place, peace ! an honorable peace ! securing all the great 
principles and demands for which the country has been contend- 
ing for eight long and doubtful years. The eff'usion of blood 
and all the terrible calamities incidental to civil strife are now to 
be matters of the past. The future is made bright by the revi- 
val of hope, and the anticipation that the toils and dangers, the 
stern resolves and active endeavors, the tears of sorrow and the 
moans of despair, of the years now happily bygone, are to be 
followed by an era of national prosperity ; an era when trades 
will again flourish, business activities once more prevail, and the 
people prosper in the tranquil possession and enjoyment of the 
liberties they have wrested from the hand of oppression. 

But all these beneficent results were not so immediate as 
might be supposed would have been the case. With the close 
of the war unreflecting persons had anticipated the enjoyment 



Prostration After the War. 549 

not only of the repose and safety of peace, but of a period of 
instant and unbounded prosperity. Such buoyant natures soon 
discovered that the country was in a most lamentable condition, 
and that the poverty of the people was almost universal. With 
the exception of some of those engaged in agricultural pursuits, 
and the few who had grown rich from privateering, or who had 
fattened on dishonest gains in government contracts, almost 
every one was deeply in debt, and insolvencies, prosecutions, 
and legal embarrassments of all kinds became common. Order, 
industry and contentment were not the flowers that first bloomed 
on the Revolutionary plant; they came later, after the disap- 
pearance of the factions, clamors, bankruptcies and distresses 
that were bred by financial depressions, and the political doubts 
and uncertainties prevailing as to the relative rights of the dif- 
ferent states. 

It must be admitted that until the recent celebration of the 
centennial of the adoption of the constitution of the United 
States, many persons who considered themselves generally well- 
grounded in history had but an indefinite conception of the 
political condition of our coimtry for the eight years succeeding 
the close of the Revolution. In their minds prevailed a con- 
fused idea that with peace came at once all the blessings that 
the country has since enjoyed, and that a staple and harmonious 
government, based on a sound constitution, was an easy and an 
almost immediate sequel to the country's independence. It is 
only recently, and through the public prints, that such persons 
have been made to realize the dangers that threatened the coun- 
try during the years intervening between the peace and the 
adoption of the constitution. The prostration of affairs, to a 
certain extent, can be ascribed to the great deterioi-ation in the 
character of the men who represented the colonies in the conti- 
nental congress, and to their lack of ability in coping with the 
complications arising from the slight bond existing between the 
different states. The original articles of confederation were 
entered into to meet the exigencies of war. With little or no 
powers of coercion, they wci-e of but slight avail while the con- 
flict lasted, their elflciency resting on the good faith of the peo- 
ple. When they were originally ratified, had the wishes of the 
New Jersey delegates been considered it would have been 



550 The Story of an Old Farm. 

greatly to the advantage of the country. They urged certain 
amendments to the articles of confederation that would have 
tended much to enhance the strength and usefulness of the 
national compact. These amendments were not accepted by 
congress, and as they had not been made a sine qua non to the 
New Jersey representatives the articles of confederation went 
into effect as originally passed. After the war, disputes, conten- 
tentions, and jealousies between the different sections much weak- 
ened the usefulness of the fragile tie. Some states, as early as 
1781, proposed amendments whereby greater powers should be 
secured to the general government, New Jersey going so far as 
to urge that congress, in order to meet the expenses of the war, 
should be vested with the exclusive power of regulating foreign 
and domestic trade, of collecting duties, and of selling western 
lands. Doctor Witherspoon labored to this end but the effort 
came to naught, as the people had great fears that a general govern- 
ment with power to act would at least establish an aristocracy, if 
not an autocracy. The poor man could not see any difference 
between being taxed by congress or a parliament. When the 
war came to an end national rulers were considered almost 
unnecessary, and it was with the greatest difficulty that the 
required congressional quorum for transacting business could be 
secured. 

The members of the confederated legislature were no longer, 
with individual exceptions, the best representative men of 
the country, as had been the case with those sturdy patriots 
who had first bound the thirteen provinces together by 
the Declaration of Independence. Now that the colonies were 
free from British rule there no longer seemed that necessity for 
cohesion that a common danger had fostered. Petty differences 
and distrust of each other usurped the place of united patriotism, 
for each representative but reflected the sentiment of the legisla- 
ture of his state in being indifferent, if not fairly hostile, to any 
combined confederation whereby a central authority could pro- 
tect the entire community in its rights and privileges. Prejudice 
was so great that even the strongest believers in the future of 
the country began to despair of the possibility of forming a piv- 
otal government, and feared that the collapse of the confederacy 
Avas imminent. Among the greatest evils of the time was the 



The Annapolis Convention. 551 

utter demoralization of the citizens in their views as to the finan- 
cial obligations of the government at large. Each state consid- 
ered that, with its worthless currency and wretched financial 
condition, its own indebtedness was load enough to carry. 
Members of congress, therefore, only voiced public opinion when 
they boldly suggested general repudiation — when they even 
broke faith with, the war-worn soldiers who by their sufferings 
and privations had freed the country, and dismissed them from 
their service with a pay of meagre thanks and the presents of 
the muskets they carried. 

Hamilton, Madison, Witherspoon, Livingston, and men of like 
metal, felt that such a sentiment of states' rights would prove a 
clog to every endeavor to amalgamate the varied and conflicting 
interests of the different sections into a homogeneous whale. 
These men did a great work at this time, both by their eloquence 
in public assemblies and by writing and distributing pamphlets, 
whereby the people were made acquainted with the dangers by 
which they were likely to be overwhelmed ; and thus a condi- 
tion of anarchy was averted. In a sort of hybrid way the 
country held together, though without respect and with but little 
authority, either at home or abroad. It was not until the year 
1786 that a ray of light pierced the dark cloud that so long had 
apparently obscured the possibilities of a future for that America 
which but ten years before had aroused the plaudits of the civ- 
ilized world. In January Virginia called a convention for con- 
sultation as to the country's need of a greater uniformity in com- 
mercial laws. In response to the invitation representatives from 
four states met at Annapolis, the New Jersey delegates being 
vested with greater powers for providing for the exigencies of 
the Union than were those from the other states, whose instruc- 
tions confined their deliberations and acts to regulating trade 
and commerce. The members of this convention finding their 
powers too limited to adequately meet the requirements of the 
occasion, and that the number of the states represented were too 
few, adjourned, after issuing an address or report advising that 
another convention should be called in May, 1787. This address 
further urged that, in order that the deliberations could result in 
an adjustment of parts of the federal system other than the regu- 
lation of trade, the deputies to this second convention should 



552 The Story of an Old Fakm. 

be empowered with an authority equal to that in which the New 
Jersey delegates Avere clothed at Annapolis. 

As has been shown, at this time all the elements of a great nation 
were in solution, only needing for their precipitation the direction 
of a master political mind. Happily for the United States that 
was to be, Alexander Hamilton was equal to the demands of the 
occasion. He was a delegate to the first convention, and recog- 
nized this to be a great opportunity for addressing the country 
as to the dangers threatening the national life, and through the 
heart of the body politic the freedom of each individual 
province. Throwing the whole force of his fervent soul and 
great talentsin to the work, he succeeded in destroying the apathy 
of the communities, and in exciting a general desire that one 
gra^d effort should be made to establish a government based on 
mutual right, honor and protection. This resulted in the sum- 
moning of a second council which met on the tenth of May, 1787 
in Philadelphia. 

The convention closed its doors and occupied the entire summer 
in considering the state of the nation. The delegates fortunately 
were chosen from among the ablest men of the different states, 
New Jersey's representatives being William Livingston, William 
Paterson, William C. Houston and Jonathan Dayton. Nobly did 
this historic body perform its work. Some idea of the extent and 
patience of the labors of these delegates can be obtained from the 
notes made by James Madison, which recite that seveu hundred 
and eighty-two speeches, long and short, were delivered in the con- 
vention. The greatest number were by Gouverneur Morris, who 
spoke one hundred and seventy-three times; Madison, himself, 
made one hundred and sixty-three addresses. Among the silent 
members was William Livingston ; his talents and ability, however, 
exerted a powerful influence over the delegates, and a writer of 
that time names him as the best scholar in the convention. It 
was not until the autumn that the great work was accomplished, 
and the constitution of the United States presented to the world. 
The citizens had looked upon the secret deliberations of the 
members as those of a mere trade convention, but they found, to 
the subsequent happiness of the coimtry, that there had been 
framed for them a more perfect bond of union, whereby the 
industrial and political interests of the nation had been power- 



New Jersey Ratifies the Constitution. 553 

fully linked together by a document that has stood the test of poli- 
tical convulsions, and has proved in value to the country only 
second to the Declaration of Independence. 

The great question then came before the citizens — would the 
draft of the constitution submitted by the convention be sanction- 
ed by the states ? The political history of our country testifies 
that New Jersey has ever been among the first in attachment to 
the Union, and always ready to sacrifice her own pretensions for 
the general good of the whole country. When the constitution 
was adopted the New Jersey delegates, notwithstanding they 
had been in favor of much that differed from the ultimate form 
taken by the compact, waived their preferences in favor of the 
general welfare, and signed the instrument. The state was 
equally prompt in endorsing the acts of its representatives ; the 
legislature ordered a state convention to meet at Trenton in 
December, and on the eighteenth of that month the constitution 
was unanimously ratified. This action was in marked contrast 
to that of some of the states, in several of whose conventions the 
whole battle had to be fought over again. New York did not 
ratify until in July, 1788, and then but just escaped not giving 
its sanction. It was in November, 1789, before North Carolina 
accepted the constitution, and stiff-necked little Rhode Island held 
aloof till May, 1790. She was the last of the thirteen to come 
into the Union, but the constitution had by its terms become the 
supreme law of the land on the twenty-first of June, 1788, when 
the ninth state ratified the federal compact. 

But all this has carried us too far in advance of our story ; we 
must return to the years immediately following the end of the 
Revolution. Notwithstanding the glorious results that were 
assured by the successful termination of the war, the blessings, 
to a considerable degree, were to be a heritage of future genera- 
tions. The generation whose sacrifices had achieved indepen- 
dence must needs first eat the bitter fruits of strife. The land 
was full of widows and orphans. The impoverishment of estates 
was the rule rather than the exception. The financial demor- 
alization of the entire country hampered all efforts at trade. 
Another bar to the complete enjoyment of peace was the division 
of families on political lines ; for patriots and loyalists no longer 
possessed a common country. The following letter written by 



554 The Story of an Old Farm. 

Aaron Malick in 1788 shows that the occupants of the "Old 
Stone House" did not altogether escape from this latter evil. 
This letter was written to William and John Melick, the sons of 
Gottfried Moelich, who came to America with Johannes Moelich 
in 1735, and settled in Sussex, now Warren county. At the 
outbreak of the war William, the elder son, was not in sympathy 
with the Revolutionary movement, and joined the British army, 
serving as a sergeant in a regiment of foot. He saw much 
active service, and was wounded by a musket-ball, which he car- 
ried in his shoulder till his death. In 1784, in company with 
thirty-five thousand other loyalist Americans, he was forced to 
emigrate to Nova Scotia. With him went his j^ounger brother 
John. The latter does not appear to have been an active enemy 
of his country, and in leaving the United States was probably 
actuated by the natural love and affection he bore his brother 
William. They settled in St. John, New Brunswick, establish- 
ing themselves there in active business, becoming valued and 
honored citizens of the British Possessions. Their numerous 
descendants to-day occupy prominent positions in the social 
and business circles of St. John. 

Somerset County East New Jersey. 

Dear Cozen. I Received your Kind Letter witli a Deal of Happiness To Hear 
of your welfare — As it found us all in Good Health, Thanks Be to the Almighty 
we still Continue in the same. 

I Have Nothing in Particular To inform you But I forward your Letter to your 

Brother Jacob, By My Daughter, and She found them All well 1 Have no 

news to write. But we Have very Dull Times in the way of Our Trade upon 
the Account of Paper money wich we have among us wich will not Pass in any 
Other state but Our Own wich makes it very Dificult in Geting Hides. Lather 
sells now for our money Sole Leather a 2-6 and uper a 4-0 pr pound proc money and 
Hides Goes a 6d. pr lb the same money — I would Inform you that my Brother in 
Law Jacob Klines' family is all well but himself. Old age Crowds upon him wich 
makes him weakley and almost Childish. 

I must Now Conclude with myne and my Wiffes' & family's Kind Love to you 
and John. 

from Your Loving Cozen 

Aaron Malick. 

November 14th 1788. 

To William & John Malick. 

Of the many untoward circumstances connected with the 
Revolutionary war, none were more particularly calamitous 
than the divided sentiments among honest citizens as to the policy 
of rebellion. CivW war involves cruelties and hardships that are 



Different Grades of Tories. 555 

unknown when civilized nations contend with each other. Every- 
man is forced to actively take sides in the contest; this, of course, 
greatly aggravates the miseries of strife, as neighbors and 
friends are thus made antagonists. The American whigs were 
naturally greatly exasperated against those of their fellow-citi- 
zens who upheld the course of Britain, and felt toward them a 
resentment much greater than that harbored against their Euro- 
pean adversaries. The desertion of their countrymen in the 
hour of trial, early in the war, filled them with angry hatred, 
and as the years went on this rancor was increased by the feel- 
ing that the prolongation of the conflict, and the asperity with 
which it was carried on, was largely due to the aid and informa- 
tion furnished to the enemy by the so-called renegade Ameri- 
cans. 

Among the loyalists were many worthy persons who in adher- 
ing to the Crown were merely living up to their honest convic- 
tions. Of such, some, like William Melick, braving their lives 
and fortunes for their beliefs entered the English army. Others, 
like John Melick, loved peace and justice, and were content to 
stand aside and take no active part in the controversy. But 
there was a third tory element whose conduct throughout the 
contest has fastened a stigma upon the name, loyalist, that will 
last as long as the pages of history remain open for inspection. 
Humanity shudders at recounting the atrocities committed by 
these fiends who revelled in blood and murder ; whose rapacious 
and ingenious cruelties toward those among whom they had been 
born and bred were often such as would never have occurred 
to a foreign soldiery. All tories were forced to sufifer for the 
dastardly acts of these inhuman Americans, and so it was that 
the hatred for these people dated from the very beginning of the 
war. Throughout the entire time that the prolonged contest 
continued patriot and royalist may be said to have had each 
other by the throats. 

Dominated by their sympathies, historians, too often per- 
haps, have been prone to dwell and enlarge upon the overt 
acts of the king's American adherents, but to the dis- 
passionate student of history evidence abounds going to make 
plain that tory and whig were alike intolerant of each other's 
convictions, and ready to fall one upon the other as opportunities 



556 The Story of .an Old Farm. 

occurred. The following strong language is taken from the 
minutes of a meeting of the general committee of observation and 
inspection for Middlesex county held on the sixteenth of Janu- 
ary, 1775, and is quoted as showing the feeling animating the 
whigs even at that early date : — 

Resolved — That we think it our duty piiblickly to declare our contempt and 
detestation of those insidious scribblers who, with the vilest views, enlist them- 
selves in the cause of ministry, and by tlie vilest means endeavor to effect a dis- 
union among the good people of the colonies, that they may become a prey to 
the oppression against which they are so laudably and unanimously struggling; 
who skulk beliind prostituted printing-presses, and with the assistance of the 
prostituted conductors of them labor to circulate their pestilent compositions 
through the land, under the show of friendship and a regard to the publick 
good; who, with the most unexampled effrontery against tiie sense of every man 
of the least information and impartiality, will persist in retailing the rotten, 
exploded, and ten thousand times confuted doctrines of a passive acquiescence in 
the measures of government, however distempered and tyrannical. 

The following extract from a Briton's letter home, published 
in England, was said to have been taken from a " rebel " news- 
paper : — 

At Quibbletown, Middlesex county, N. J., Thomas Randolph, cooper, who had 
publicly proved himself an enemy to his country by reviling and using his utmost 
endeavors to oppose the proceedings of tiie continental and Provincial Conven- 
tions and Committees in deffence of their rights and liberties, and he being 
judged a person of not consequence enough for a severer punisiiment was ordered 
to be stripped naked, well coated with tar and featiiers, and carried in a wagon 
publicly around the town, which punishment was accordingly inflicted ; and as 
he soon became duly sensible of his offence, for which lie earnestly begged par- 
don, and promised to atone as far as he was able by a contrary behavior fur the 
future, he was released and suffered to return to his house in less than half an 
hour. Tlie whole was conducted with that regularity and decorum that ought to 
be observed in all public punislimenls. 

The "New York Journal" of the ninth of February, 1775, 
defines a tory as a thing whose head is in England and its body 
in America, with a neck that ought to be stretched. This not 
only fairly expresses the sentiment with which they were 
regTirded, but suggests, also, the mode of treatment they had too 
often dealt them. In 1778, after the British had evacuated Phil- 
adelphia and retreated to Sandy Hook, both Pennsylvania and 
New Jersey brought to trial such citizens as had given aid and 
comfort to the enemy. Of those convicted in Philadelphia two 
were hung ; but Governor Livingston pardoned seventeen, being 
the entire number found guilty in New Jersey. Naturally one 



Provincial Officers in the English Service. 557 

wonders to what extent disloyalty prevailed in our state. It 
has always been difficult to estimate the number of disaffected in 
any one state, or even to determine how many entered the Eng- 
lish service. No record can be obtained of those who enlisted 
in regular regiments, but the muster-rolls of the provincial corps 
have been preserved. Sabine, the historian of the loyalists, 
estimates the latter to have been at least twenty-five thousand, 
and tory documents claim that between the years 1781 and 
1783 the king had more American soldiers than had congress. 
It is undoubtedly true that at that time disaffection was much 
more rife in neighborhoods where the British had long quartered 
than it had been at the outset of the war. 

Gaine's " Universal Register, or American and British Calen- 
der," published in 1781a list of the provincial officers in the English 
service. From it we glean the following Jersey names : — Court- 
landt Skinner was brigadier-general of the New Jersey volunteers; 
he had been attorney-general and speaker of the assembly, and 
was the son of the Reverend William Skinner, the rector of St. 
Peter's chm-ch at Perth Amboy. The first battalion of his com- 
mand was raised largely through the instrumentality of Elisha 
Lawrence of Monmouth county. Among its officers was Major 
John Barnes, who had been the high sheriff of Hunterdon county, 
and at whose house, in Trenton, Washington had quartered pre- 
vious to the battle of Assunpink. He did not long serve his king 
as a soldier, being fatally wounded on the twenty-second of 
August, 1777. A later major of this same command was Thomas 
Millidge, of Morris county, who before the war had been deputy- 
surveyor of New Jersey. William S. Stryker, in his monograph 
on the New Jersey loyalists, speaks of him as having always been 
represented as a very honorable man, firm in his convictions of 
duty, and correct in his habits of life. His son Phineas was an 
ensign in the same regiment. Another of its ensigns was James 
Moody, who is reported to have been one of the most aciive 
partisans of the war. Sabine says that he was an inoffensive 
farmer until the persecutions of his whig neighbors drove him 
into the army. In his forays he secured numerous officers and 
men, besides destroying many arms and much ammimition and 
property. On one occasion with only seven men he captured 
eighteen militia officers and committee men; at one time he was 



558 The Story of an Old Farm. 

made a spy on Washington, and as a reward for securing the 
general's papers received a lieutenantcy. 

Lieutenant-Colonel Isaac Allen, who commanded the 2d New 
Jersey battalion, was a prominent lawyer of Trenton. In the 
same regiment was Major Robert Drummond, who was a valuable 
recruiting officer for Skinner's brigade, he having, it is said, 
induced two hundred of his neighbors to enlist. Before the war 
he lived where is now Passaic, being a leading country merchant 
and a member of the provincial assembly. In 1775-76 he was 
a deputy to the provincial congress, but in July of the latter 
year opposed the adoption of the state constitution. He then 
went over to the enemy, served during the war and died in Lon- 
don in 1789. Captain Joseph Lee, also of this 2d Battalion, 
before entering the army in 1776, was jailed at Trenton as a 
tory Jerseyman. Lieutenant-Colonel Abraham Buskirk, who 
commanded the 4th New Jersey battalion, was an active partisan 
who committed many depredations, including burning the Eliza- 
bethtown church in 1780. Among his officers were his son, 
Captain Jacob Buskirk, Lieutenant John Van Buskirk and Cap- 
tain Samuel Ryerson ; the latter in the neighborhood of Paterson 
raised a company of sixty men. Captains Lawrence and Abraham 
Buskirk and Lieutenant Thomas Van Buskirk were in Lieutenant- 
Colonel John Bard's Orange Rangers. The adjutant of Tarle- 
ton's British legion was Lawyer William Taylor, the son of 
Sheriff John Taylor of Monmouth county. In Lieutenant-Col- 
onel Roger's King's Rangers were Captain John Hatfield, or 
Hetfield, who was probably the same man who hung a poor but- 
cher, Ball, at Bei'gen Point; Lieutenant Richard Lippencott, who 
undoubtedly hung Captain Huddy ; and Lieutenant Christopher 
Insley. This last officer was probably the one of the same name 
killed at Tom's River in 1781. Major John Van Dyke raised a 
corps of three hundred and six men in New Jersey, and Major 
Richard Stockton, of the 6th Battalion, because of his familiarity 
with the state's highways and by-ways, became known as the 
famous land pirate. He belonged to the Princeton family, but 
was no credit to the name, being a tory of the most malignant 
stripe, his villainies earning for him an unenviable reputation. 

At the close of the war congress was bound by the English 
treaty to urge the states to abstain from persecuting those wha 



Indignation Against the Tories. 559 

had been faithful to the crown. It was found impossible for the 
general government to influence the states in furtherance of this 
pledge. Popular indignation against the tories was great, and 
now that the people had in their power the violent oppressors of 
those who had been of the patriot cause, they would not brook 
an interference with what they considered their just rights of 
retaliation. Notwithstanding the recommendation of congress 
vengeance was visited on the " Fawning Spaniels." The follow- 
ing from a Massachusetts paper may be accepted as a fair expo- 
nent of the feeling prevailing at that time : — 

As Hannibal swore never to be at peace with the Romans ; so let every Whig 
swear by his abhorrence of slavery, by liberty and religion, by the shades of 
departed friends who have fallen in battle, by the ghosts of those of our breth- 
eren who have been destroyed on board of prison-ships and in loathsome dun- 
geons, never to be at peace with those fiends the refugees, whose thefts, murders, 
and treasons, have filled our cup of woe. 

Such being the sentiments of the community there was noth- 
ing left for the loyalists to do but fly the country. Consequently 
thousands were forced to emigrate to foreign shores. The Eng- 
lish government did much for its faithful American subjects 
besides insisting upon the stipulations regarding them being 
entered in the treaty of peace. For those who feared facing the 
resentment of their countrymen, vessels were provided to bear 
them to the Bahamas, the West Indies, and to the bleak shores 
of Nova Scotia. In 1782 a committee was appointed by parlia- 
ment to take in consideration the claims made by loyalists for 
indemnity. This resulted in large sums being for several years 
annually paid for their comfort, until a permanent board of com- 
missioners was established, whose labors brought about the dis- 
tribution by the English government of nearly fifteen millions of 
dollars. Sabine mentions this as ^' an unparallelled instance of 
magnanimity and justice in a nation which had expended nearly 
one hundred and sixteen millions in the war." 

Among the American whigs, not all cried persistently for ven- 
geance against the loyalists. There were notable and honorable 
exceptions, and as a rule they were found among those who had 
been the most active and prominent in the patriotic cause. Of 
these, Alexander Hamilton, from the very cessation of hostilities, 
pursued a policy of leniency toward tories, and plead that their 
mistaken course during the war should not inevitably result in 



560 The Story of an Old Farm. 

their losing citizenship and property. Early in 1788 he by his 
eloquence, aided by the efforts of Schuyler, succeeded in passing 
a bill which repealed the " Loyalist Disfranchising Act." Tyler, 
in his life of Patrick Henry, avers that while the war lasted no 
man spoke against the tories more sternly than did this patriotic 
Virginia statesman. The war being ended and its great pur- 
poses secured, no man, excepting perhaps Alexander Hamilton, 
was so prompt and so energetic in urging that all animosities of 
the war should be laid aside, and that a policy of magnanimous 
forbearance should be pursued respecting the baffled opponents 
of American independence. However much good these earnest 
men accomplished by preaching the doctrine of returning good 
for evil, it could not inure to the benefit of such tories as had 
already suffered attainder and confiscation. Among these was 
William Melick, against whom proceedings were instituted as 
early as 1778. The following is from the records of the Sussex 
county quarter-sessions, and is interesting as showing the mode 
of procedure in such cases. It is a sad commentary on the bit- 
terness existing at that time between those closely allied in 
blood, to see the name of Captain Andrew Malick — William's 
cousin and Aaron's brother — among the jurors on the inquisition. 

Sussex County SS. An Inquisition taken and made at Oxford in this County 
of Sussex the 20th day of June in the year of our Lord One thousand seven hun- 
dred and seventy-eight by the Oaths of the undermentioned Jury, good and law- 
ful men of the said County before James Davison Esqr. one of the Justices of the 
Peace of tlie said County who upon their Oaths af.s. say that AVilliam Melick did 
since tiie fourth Day of June One thousand seven hundred and seventy-eight (to 
wit) On or about the first Day of January One thousand seven hundred and 
seventy -eight join the army of the King of Great Britain against the form of his 
Allegiance to liis State and against the Peace of this State the Government and 

Dignity of the same We whose names are here unto set and Seals affixed 

being the Jurors above named Do upon the Evidence— to us produced find the 
Inquisition afs true 

Peter Smith (s) 

Peter Wyckofl (s) 

Ernest Menge (s) 

David Vanderea (s) 

Michael Gasler (s) 

Christopher Grose (s) 

Lawrence Lambertson (s) 

David Johnson (a) 

Benj.n McCuUough (s) 

Coart Johnson (s) 



Joseph Macken 


(«) 


Andrew Malick 


(8) 


John Petty 


(8) 


George Kibble 


(8) 


John Pettinger 


(8) 


Joseph Hixson 


(8) 


Christian Sharp 


(8) 


Peter Williamson 


(8) 


James Williamson 


(8) 


Peter Vanette 


(8) 


Christian Cummans 


(8) 



An Inquisition Against a Loyalist. 



561 



I do hereby certify that the above Inquisition was taken before me the Day and 
year above said as Witness my hand and Seal 

James Davison (s) 

New Jersey \ 

Sussex C!ounty / Quarter Sessions November Term A. D. 1778 

presentiTiraothy Symmes "J 

George Allen V Esqrs. Justices 

Thomas Hazen j 

The State \ Inquisition for joining the army of the King of Great Britain 

William Meleck j &c Proclamation being made and the said William Meleck or 

some Person in his Behalf or some Person who might think himself 

Interested being three times called to appear and traverse pursuant to 

Law the Inquisition found and taken against the said William Meleck, 

and no Person appearing to traverse the same, Ordered that his second 

Default be recorded and final Judgment entered accordingly On Motion 

of Wm Anderson for the Atty Genl. 

Certified to, as a true copy, by Charles Rhodes Esq Clerk of the County of 
Sussex and state of New Jersey on the 25th day of May A. D. 1787. 



An Estimate of the real and personal Estate of Sergeant William Melick late 
of the County of Sussex Province of New Jersey. 



To Estate left by his Father 420 Acres Land with buildings, of which 

he was to have the Ninth part 
To his Share 

To Moveables £500 value of which he was to have Ninth part. 
To his share of the above 
To' Estate lett by his Father and Mother, 250 Acres, of which he was 

to have the seventh part 
To his Share 



To his own Property 
To Horse, Saddle and Bridle 

To (irain (Wheat) 200 Bushels (& Rye) 

To summer Grain, 50 Bushels 
" SSheeps 

The above Praised by us 

James Stewart Capt. 

N. J. V. 
Wm Hutchinson Capt. 
Sept. 12th 1783. 1 Batt. N. J. V. 



Value 
Value 



161 


2 


55 


11 


107 


2 


38 




45 


15 


4 


10 


1 


16 



2 
1 

10 



TO ALL WHOM IT MAY CONCERN. 

New Jersey ss. This may certify that the part and share of the Estate of 
Godfrey Mellick deceased, belonging to William Mellick the son, who forfeited 
the same by joining the army of the King of Great Britain, amounts to the sum 
of ninety pounds, one shilling and five pence Proclamation money of the State 
aforesaid, and which came into the hands of the executors of the said Godfrey 
Mellick deoeased, was paid by them unto Joseph Gaston Esqr, agent for confiscated 
Estates in the County of Sussex. And they further certify that they never 
36 



562 The Story of an Old Farm. 

received any other part of the said William Mellick's estate but the sum above 
mentioned, the remainder being taken out of the hands of other Persons. 
As witness our hands this Fifteenth day of September 1787 — 

Margaret Tomer. 
Andrew Malick. 
Thos. Hughes. 
On this 15th day of September A. D. 1787, Came before me Thomas Anderson 
Esqr, One of the Justices of the Peace for the County of Sussex the undernamed 
Subscribers, Executors of the last will and Testament of Godfrey Mellick dec'd 
who being sworn on the Holy Evangelists of Almighty God, deposeth that all the 
matters and things in the above Cirtificate contained are the Truth — and further 
saith not. 

Taken before me \ Andrew Malick. 

the day and year above j Thos. Hughes. 

Thomas Anderson. 




CHAPTER XXXVII. 

The Old Stone House In 1788 — The First Bedminster Tavern — 
John Malick, Innkeeper — The Practice of Medicine in the 
Last Century. 

The drag-net of history brings to the surface both big and little 
fishes. Our seine no longer sinks into deep, or troubled waters 
but explores peaceful shallows, and we must be content with such 
catches as these lesser fishing-grounds affbrd. Now that the 
interest of colonial times no longer attaches to our narrative, and 
now that the fragrant smoke of the calumet of peace has taken 
the place of the flaring torch of war, it is reasonable to suppose 
that to some extent the general reader will lose interest in these 
pages. The remaining chapters must necessarily be devoted to 
the sober, and doubtless tame, chronicles of the ordinary incidents 
in the lives of the members of a simple country family. Possibly 
those readers who remain with the writer to the end will find that 
their time has not been altogether misspent. Perhaps such ones 
may feel the satisfaction that often comes to those few favored 
kinsmen and neighbors who, when the guests have departed and 
the lights are low, linger with their host about the fire for a part- 
ing glass, and pass a final hour in social sympathy and inter- 
course. Such a time always opens the sluices of the heart, and 
brings that comfortable enjoyment of each other that can only 
exist between those bound by the ties of intimate friendship. 

As we occasionally look upon the miniature woi'ld revolving 
within the narrow horizon of the walls of the Old Stone House 
it ever presents a difi'erent aspect. With each successive season, 
with each decade and generation, changes are always to be noted. 
Children grow to be men and women. Familiar faces alter as 
their lines deepen, tracing where tears have flowed, where mirth 



564 The Story of an Old Farm. 

has lurked, where sunshine and shade have chased each other 
across their owners' lives. As we turn again in the year 1788 
to survey the Bedminster household we discover little tremulous 
tones in Aaron's voice which tell of the seventy-two years that 
have over him gone. We find that the tide in the current of his 
family-life, which swelled with the birth and growth of each 
child, now, having passed the flood, is on the ebb. Children 
grown to be men and women soon find homes of their own, and 
Aaron's offspring were no exception to this rule. His generation, 
like the one it succeeded, is making way for the one that is to 
follow, for four of his children have taken husbands and wives, 
and a second Aaron is playing about the hearth of the deep- 
chested fireplace in the living-room. 

Catharine, the oldest daughter, married in 1782 Peter Ferine, 
a fellow-campaigner of her brother John. His emigrant ancestor 
and great-great-grandfather was Daniel Ferine of the Channel 
island of Jersey, who came to America in 1665 on the ship 
Fhilip, with Governor Fhilip Carteret. Peter Ferine and 
Catharine Melick moved to Salem, Washington county. New 
York, in which vicinity numerous descendants of their seven 
children are still living. Margaret, Aaron's second daughter, 
married, in about 1787, Joseph Graston. They moved to North- 
umberland county, Pennsylvania, where they had seven children, 
whose descendants are distributed in different parts of that state. 
Daniel, Aaron's second son, had married his playmate from over 
the brook, Margaret Gaston, in 1785, their first child, Aaron, 
having been bom in April 1786. Before this time he had enter- 
ed into partnership with his father in the tannery, and their 
books and papers show them to have carried on at that time a 
large and prosperous business. Daniel spent his life on the 
''Old Farm." His twelve children were born in the stone 
house, five of them making it their homes for their lives. 

Before the time of which we are now writing Aaron had come 
into possession of the entire tract of land originally purchased by 
his father from George Leslie. It will be remembered 
that Aaron's brother Peter inherited that portion of the 
land lying on the Lamington road. This property he con- 
veyed to Aaron as early as 1772, but does not appear to 
have given possession until several years later. As we have 



The First Bedminster Tavern. 565 

seen, he was living on this inheritance at the time of the capture 
of General Lee in 1776. From two paid bonds in my posses- 
sion, aggregating two hundred and sixty-seven pounds, given by 
Aaron to Peter in 1777, I draw the conclusion that the transfer 
was consummated at that time. Sometime during the war Peter 
left the neighborhood, living for awhile at Perth Amboy. Ulti- 
mately he settled in the vicinity of Martinsville in Somerset 
county, where some of his descendants are still living. 

Aaron's eldest son, John the Revolutionary soldier, celebrated 
the advent of peace by taking unto himself a wife. In April, 
1783, he married Jane Coriel, a Somerset maiden eighteen years 
old. Three years later his father established him in business by 
building for him on the comer of the Peapack and Lamington 
roads the first Bedminster tavern. A portion of this original 
structure is still to be seen in the present edifice. Large barns 
and sheds were erected on the opposite corner on the present 
site of Martin Bunn's store. So now we know how at least one 
of the continental soldiers occupied himself when campaigning 
was over. We may readily imagine that while comfortably 
seated before his tap-room fire he shortened winter evenings by 
re-fighting his battles for the benefit of friends and admiring 
neighbors. In those old days, when all travel was in tlie saddle 
or on wagon wheels, the innkeeper was a man of much conse- 
quence in the community, and the door of the village tavern was 
not considered the entrance to a bridge connecting vice and 
morality. 

So it was, that not only the chance traveller, catching sight of 
John's swinging sign, found rest and comfort at his little hostel- 
rie ; here, on the sanded floor of his old-fashioned bar in cold 
weather, or on the long benches flanking the front porch in smn- 
mer, were to be found all grades of rural society, from the village 
magnate to '^ Boots " and the hostler. Here came federalist and 
republican to dispute and argue over their glasses on politics and 
party ; here came old soldiers to tell over and over again how 
the day was won at Princeton and at Monmouth ; here came the 
gossiping doctor to bait his horse and only too ready to dissemi- 
nate the news gained in his daily peregrinations ; even the min- 
isters thought it no sin to go out of their way in order to stop for 
a chat with John and his wife ; nor did they consider that they 



566 The Story of an Old Farm. 

were putting an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains, 
while enjoying honest libations of liquor that had mellowed 
within their host's oaken staves. 

That some of the doctor's visits to Bedminster tavern were 
professional is shown by the following bill, which is an interest- 
ing exhibit as to the generous doses prescribed by old-time 
physicians : — 



Mr. John Melick 








1787. 




To Wm. McKissack 




Dr. 


Feby 26 


Child To Anthelmintic Powders 




£ 1 6 




(( 


Vermifuge Decoction with Senna 




2 


April 17 




A Visit, 3 Doses Pectoral Drops 
Emetic & ^ oz. Liquorice Juice 




3 6 
1 6 


19 


(( 


1 oz. Febrifuge Julip 




1 


29 


Self 


ZxMercurial Ointment & Box 




2 




Family " 


1 oz. Alterative Powder & 3j ozs. 


Itch Ointmen 


t 7 3 


May 21 


Dangr " 


An Emetic 




1 


Novr 12 M 


rs. Melick " 


Cathartic Powder 




1 6 


14 


Do 


Ijdr. Camphor 




1 


1788. 










May 11 


Do 


2 dr. Essential Oil & 2 Anodyne ' 


Pills 


2 6 
£ 1 4 9 



Doctor William McKissack was at that time a resident of 
Pluckamin, but he subsequently removed to Bound Brook, where 
he died in 1831, aged seventy-seven. He enjoyed an extensive 
practice and was widely known and esteemed for his professional 
judgment and skill. The country physician of colonial days, and 
of the years ending with the last century, led a laborious life. 
Most of his waking hours were spent in riding long distances 
over bad roads. He was obliged to be hail-fellow well-met with 
every one in the count^s for on his popularity largely depended 
his professional success. In those toping-days there was always 
something on the sideboard for the doctor, of which he was rarely 
loath to take advantage ; consequently, he generally mellowed 
with the years, grew rotund in person, and, like Hawthorne's 
middle-aged Englishman, " his legs abbreviated themselves, and 
his stomach assumed that dignified prominence which justly- 
belonged to that metropolis of his system." His eye contracted 
a merry twinkle, a chuckle lurked in his full throat always 
ready for use, and gradually he grew to be known as a peripa- 
tetic story-teller, and often the best gossip in the county. 



Medical Knowledge in the Last Century, 567 

So it was with Doctor McKissack. At the time of his visits 
to John Malick's family he was ah'eady a large, burly man with 
an expansive girth. Owing to his great popularity he was wel- 
comed by every one, and, being a generous liver, it is said that 
sometimes he too frequently accepted the invitation of his friends 
and patients to recoup himself after arduous hours on the road. 
Doctor A. W. McDowell, in writing of old times in Pluckamin, 
says that on one occasion Doctor McKissack drove from that 
village to Somerville. Starting for home after nightfall, a little 
exhilarated, he mounted his horse forgetting that there was a 
sulky behind. On the way back, disturbed by the noise of the 
wheels, he continually cried out, " Turn out ! Turn out behind ! 
don't run over me ! " Still the rattle of the wheels continued, 
and in constant fear he journeyed on. It was not until he 
reached Pluckamin that the discovery was made that he was 
astride of a harnessed horse hooked to his own empty sulky. 

The gradual growth of medical knowledge in New Jersey is 
an interesting study. The beginning of things for the healing 
art may be said to date after the year 1670, for it was of then 
that Oldmixon, the ancient historian, wrote that the province 
had no lawyers, physicians, or parsons. To have been without 
a curer for isoul, body or estate suggests a society in its most 
primitive stage. Even early in the last century New Jersey 
possessed few or no regular medical practitioners. We have already 
made the acquaintance of John Johnstone of Perth Amboy, who 
about the year 1700 stood almost alone as a skilful physician. 
But he held too many public offices within the gift of the peo- 
ple and of the crown to find time for medical practice, except 
when without pay he alleviated the ills of the poor. At that 
time wherever a church was planted there was apt to be a fair 
physician in the minister, but the people, generally, were obliged 
to doctor themselves, or, what was worse, to rely upon the ser- 
vices of ignorant old women and their herbs. Even up to the 
middle of the eighteenth century in the sparsely settled portions 
of the country the healing art was almost wholly in the hands of 
such persons. The basis of most of their remedies was sas- 
safras and other simple roots and herbs from which decoctions 
were made, infused with much ignorance and not a little super- 
stition. Professor Kalm makes mention of medical women 



568 The Story of an Old Farm. 

among the Swedes of West Jersey in 1748, and Winterbot- 
tom, in his "■ History of America," as late as 1796 reports that 
in Cape May county it was only in the most extraordinary cases 
that women were not called upon as doctors. In the practice of 
obstetrics, even in the large cities, the entire reliance was upon 
women, and very generally upon ignorant old women. The late 
Doctor Stephen Wickes, in his '^ History of Medicine in New 
Jersey," states that it was not until the close of the first half of 
the century that any intelligent effort was made to educate men 
in this branch of the profession. It met with great opposition, 
as ignorance, prejudice, and female modesty combined in mak- 
ing the belief general that it would be impossible to use the ser- 
vices of men in such cases. Before the Revolution, one Doctor 
Atwood is said to have been the first physician who dared to 
scandalize the feelings of the community by offering his services 
as an accoucheur. It was due to Doctors William Shippen of 
Philadelphia and V. B. Tennent of New Jersey that the 
science of midwifery assumed its place among the regular 
branches of medical education. Doctor Shippen advertised in 
the "Pennsylvania Gazette" on the first of January, 1765, the 
notice of his first course of lectures. In it he takes occasion to 
condemn the practice of calling upon the services of unskilful 
old women, whereby great suffering and loss of life were caused. 
The medical school of New York established a professorship of 
midwifery in 1767, Doctor Tennent being appointed to the 
chair. 

In New Jersey, up to the close of the French and Indian 
wars, the main reliance of the people for medical attendance was 
upon the pastors of the churches. It was the custom for those 
who came from the old country to have taken a course of medi- 
cal study as a preparation for their duties in the new world. 
The native ministers, also, even up to the close of the century, 
on being educated studied both professions, and often, not con- 
tent with two, mastered so much of the law as would enable 
them to draw wills, conveyances and other legal instruments. 
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, not only like many 
other parsons prescribed and supplied medicine, but published 
a book called " Primitive Physick," which went through thirty 
editions. The ignorance of the times and the extraordinary 



Old Time Medical Remedies. 569 

remedies in use can best be exemplified by quoting a few pre- 
scriptions contained in this precious medical volume. For a 
violent bleeding of the nose a piece of white paper was recom- 
mended to be placed under the tongue. Treatment for cancer in 
the breast was to swallow in a pint of warm ale an infusion dis- 
illed from warts taken from a horse's leg ; goose-dung was also 
to be applied externally. Consumptives were directed to breathe 
for fifteen minutes each morning in a hole cut in fresh turf. 
The sovereign remedy for apoplexy was a pint of salted water ; 
for cuts, poultices of toasted cheese ; for a cold in the head, 
orange peel thrust up the nostril, and so on, ad nauseam. 

As the century grew older men began to appear througho ut 
the middle colonies who could properly claim some medical knowl- 
edge, but still, they, like their predecessors the ministers and old 
women, relied mainly upon herbs and roots for the curing of dis- 
eases. Doctor Wickes quotes Salmon's ' Herbal ' as a standard 
work on such remedies. This book of twelve hundred pages 
was issued in England in 1696 at a cost of sixty pounds per 
volume. It was the text-book for many New Jersey doctors up 
to the time of the Revolution. It must not be supposed that at 
this time NcvV Jersey stood alone within the black belt of medi- 
cal ignorance. Like all other colonies she reflected the customs 
of the home country. England was still wanting in almost all 
the present advanced knowledge of materia medica and its man- 
ner of practice. Lord Colchester narrates in his ''Diary" that 
up to 1754 no London physician ever visited the wards of a hos- 
pital, and only on rare occasions met any of his patients. The 
healing was attempted through the medium of the apothecaries, 
who would visit the doctor at his home and describe the symp- 
toms of the sick under their care. The celebrated Doctor 
Meade, who died in 1754, used to go to Batsson's coffee-house in 
the city and there consult with and prescribe for all the apothe- 
caries. 

Medical progress in the middle colonies can be said to date 
from the French and English wars — 1758-66; this was certainly 
80 in New Jersey. That province furnished a quota of one 
thousand men ; the surgeons and surgeons' mates attached to 
these troops were thrown in contact with medical men connected 
with the British regulars, who had received much better educa- 



570 The Story of an Old Farm. 

tion than had those of the colony. The result was a recognition 
on the part of the Jersey doctors of their own inferiority, which 
bred a natural ambition to emulate the attainments of their 
brother officers. They learned much by this association with 
ciUtivated physicians, and to a certain extent ignorant presumption 
and self-sufficiency retired before a more general diffusion of 
knowledge. Still, a doctor would hardly be allowed to practice 
now with the little preparation that was considered necessary 
even as late as the year 1800. This applies more especially to 
physicians outside the larger cities. The small knowledge of the 
country doctor was generally gained by what he could learn 
while serving as an apprentice or general assistant to some more 
or less well-known town practitioner. Indentures for the year 
1760 bound apprentices for four years and eight months, for 
which they paid one hundred dollars, entitling them to board, 
lodging, clothing, and such tuition as could be obtained through 
observation and experience. The indenture bound the appren- 
tice to serve his master faithfully, " his secrets keep, his lawful 
commands gladly everywhere obey." He was forbidden to incur 
debts, play cards, or " contract matrimony " during his term. 
Nor could he " hant ale-houses, taverns, or play-houses." 

Of course books were few, and observation, memory and an 
aptitude for the profession constituted the best means of obtaining 
a practical knowledge of materia medica and surgery. In those 
days a majority of those seeking to become practitioners were 
without the benefit of medical schools and colleges, and public 
sentiment was as much opposed to autopsies and dissection as 
it is now to vivisection. Post-mortems were condemned by the 
ignorant public as but little better than grave-stealing. The 
uneducated masses were in full accord with George Eliot's Mrs. 
Dollop in thinking that such slashing of the dead was a poor 
tale for a doctor, who, if he was good for anything should know 
what was the matter with you before you died, and not want to 
pry into your insides after you are gone. Subjects for anato- 
mical study could with difficulty be obtained except by robbing 
graves. We learn from McMaster that when the medical school 
at Harvard college was started, a single body is said to have been 
the only one furnished for a whole year's lectures. In the year 
1750 Doctors Bard and Middleton succeeded in obtaining the 



Quantity of Dkugs Administered. 571 

cadaver of an executed criminal, and used it in dissection before 
the first anatomy class in America. In 1752 Surgeon Thomas 
Wood advertised in a New York paper a course of medical lec- 
tures to be concluded with " performing aU the operations on the 
dead body." Dr. Chovet, well known in Philadelphia during 
the Revolution, gave notice through the press in 1778 that on 
the seventh of December he would begin a course of lectures on 
anatomy, to be demonstrated by the use of skilfully constructed 
wax figures. His advertisement went on to say : 

As this course cannot be attended with the disagreeable sight or smell of 
recent diseased and putrid carcases, which often disgust even the students of 
Physick, as well as the curious, otherwise inclined to this useful and sublime 
part of natural philosophy, it is hoped this undertaking will meet with suitable 
encouragement. 

Lectures so demonstrated, we may imagine, left the student 
with but a slender acquaintance with the delicate mechanism of 
the human body. 

Old-time practitioners being without scientific culture, and 
having no notion of what is termed the philosophy of medical 
evidence, were totally ignorant of the initial treatment of cases, 
consequently were forced to start ofi" with a new patient guided 
by intuition, conjecture, and experiment, rather than a correct 
and accui'ate diagnosis. The necessary sequence of such dark- 
ness was mistakes of deplorable frequency. At that time, as a 
general thing, chemists and druggists had not yet been educated, 
and established on the most prominent corners of the towns. The 
apothecary-shop of the neighborhood was usually where the 
doctor's saddle-bags happened to be at the time. Up to the mid- 
dle of the last century, and even later, a physician's profit 
and support lay in the quantity of drugs he administered ; his 
charges not being made for professional visits, but for the medi- 
cines prescribed and furnished. In consequence he must either 
starve or dispense drugs ; his saddle-bags, therefore, were in 
constant requisition, and the stomachs of his poor patients paid 
the penalty of the unwise custom. Drugs were thus not only 
taken in large doses, but their use was not by any means con- 
fined to the sick. Purgative compounds were administered to 
the hearty and strong each spring, and it was deemed necessary 
that at that season of the year the blood of both old and young 



572 The Story of an Old Farm. 

should be purified by the use of generous doses of noxious mix- 
tures. Rhubarb and molasses were forced down the throats of 
healthy children as a fancied preventive of disease, and mercurial 
medicines were used to such an extent as often to result in the 
falling out of the patient's teeth. Powerful tinctures, loathsome 
infusions and bitter barks were prescribed in such quantities as 
would hardly be credited by physicians of the present day. 

Gentlemen of the profession, when at a loss to know what to 
prescribe, were always ready to pull out the lancet and relieve the 
patient of copious quantities of blood, often at a time when such 
a weakening and depleting treatment increased the malady and 
hastened death. Blood-letting was even resorted to in cases far 
gone with consumption, and by the old-time physician was con- 
sidered the alpha and omega of all practice. During the pre- 
valence of yellow fever in Philadelphia testimony was taken as 
to its manner of treatment. McMaster quotes from the published 
report, showing that one patient was bled twenty-two times in 
ten days, losing one hundred and seventy-six ounces of blood. 
From another of the sick one hundred and fifty ounces were taken 
in fifteen bleedings; several lost over one hundred ounces, and 
from one child but six years old thirty ounces were drawn. The 
Reverend Doctor Ashbel Green writes in his autobiography that 
when a lad of but nineteen, and without any medical knowledge, 
he used to be called upon by his father — the clergyman, physi- 
cian, fanner, and distiller — to prepare medicines, let blood, 
extract teeth, and inocidate for smallpox. 

At the beginning of the eighteenth century smallpox was still 
the enemy of mankind, as that dread disease had been from the 
sixth century, when, in Arabia, it started on its mission of death. 
It was annually committing fearful ravages — as many as four 
hundred thousand dying in Europe in one year. The East, as if 
desirous of compensating the world for originating this terrible 
scourge, gave to suffering humanity its initial knowledge of how 
to check its spread, for it was in Turkey that inoculation first 
became known. This manner of fighting the disease was intro- 
duced in the American colonies in 1721 by Doctor Zabdiel Boyls- 
ton of New England, at the earnest instigation of Cotton Mather, 
who had learned of the success in the Ottoman Empire of such 
treatment. In the face of great opposition the doctor's first 



A Wedding in the Old Stone House. 573 

experiments were made on his son, a lad of thirteen, and on two 
negro slaves. The result was such as to warrant his extending 
the operations, and during the year two hundred and forty per- 
sons were inoculated. 

For a time Doctor Boylston stood alone. Physicians, people 
and the press were intense against this new manner of combat- 
ing the smallpox. Even Franklin, who was generally far ahead 
of the times in his appreciation of what was valuable for the 
community, wrote strongly in condemnation of the practice. He 
altered his views in later life, as is shown by the following quota- 
tion from his memoirs, although long before that time the treat- 
ment had conquered opposition, and was generally accepted as a 
true preventive of this terrible scourge of the colonists : — 

In 1736 I lost one of niy sons, a tine boy of four years, by the smallpox, taken 
in the common way. I long regretted him bitterly, and still regret that I had 
not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who 
omit the operation, in the supposition that they should never forgive themselves 
if a child died under it. My example shows that the regret may be the same 
either way, and therefore that the safer should be chosen. 

It was not until the close of the century that this fell distemper 
was robbed, to a great extent, of its terrors. Jenner in 1798 
put into practical use his wonderful discovery, made some years 
before, that milkmaids who contracted a mild eruptive disease 
from handling cows' udders never suffered from the smallpox. 
Thus commenced the beneficent era of vaccination, which, when, 
after much opposition, it had been accepted by the medical fra- 
ternity, placed this terrible disease almost completely under con- 
trol, and largely relieved the world from a fear of its ravages. 

Let us abandon medical talk, and turn again to the " Old 
Stone House." There was a wedding in its best room in the 
autumn of 1788, which attracted much attention and caused con- 
siderable comment in the neighborhood. It was the marriage of 
Aaron's wife's cousin Barbara Margaret Gibbs to Daniel Cooper. 
Many guests were invited — at least we may so conclude, as trad- 
itions all concur in speaking of lavish hospitality on such occa- 
sions at the " Old Farm." The bidden relatives and neighbors 
did not find a timid or a blushing bride, for the widow Gibbs was 
seventy-seven years old and had been married twice before. 
The lusty groom was in his eighty-ninth year, and was well 
acquainted with marriage ceremonies, this being the fifth time 



574 The Story of ax Old Farm. 

that he had deliberately placed the matrimonial noose about his 
neck. We are led to believe, however, that Charlotte opened her 
house and made the occasion one of as much festivity as if the 
contracting parties were entering the bonds of wedlock for the 
first time. Father Graff came over from New Germantown to 
perform the ceremony, and affix the seal of his blessing to this 
extraordinary connection. Charlotte's cousin did not journey 
with her new husband to the end, but, like her four predecessors, 
fell by the way. The aged Mr. Cooper, however, was not dis- 
couraged ; evidently he was fond of the sex, and gave to the 
marriage relation his full countenance. Before receiving his 
final summons to relinquish wives and all mundane afiairs he 
again led to the altar a blooming bride — his sixth wife, whom, 
when he died in his one hundred and first year, he left a dis- 
consolate widow. 

Daniel Cooper was born at sea, late in the seventeenth cen- 
tury, while his parents were emigrating from Holland. On 
reaching man's estate he settled on Long Hill, in Morris county, 
becoming a farmer and a large landowner ; at one time he was 
high sherifi" of the county and for many years sat on the bench 
as magistrate. This inflexible judge — " a second Daniel come 
to judgment " — had the unhappy experience of sentencing his 
own son to be hung. On the nineteenth of August, 1773, over a 
thousand persons were assembled in the old court-house at Mor- 
ristown, which probably had never held a more interesting 
audience, nor one that exhibited a deeper sympathy with the 
course that justice had taken. They were there to hear the 
dread sentence of death pronounced upon four remarkably fine- 
looking men who were arraigned before the bar of the court. 
Among them was the son of Daniel Cooper, one of the magis- 
trates sitting on the bench in judgment. 

In all Mr. Cooper had eleven children. One of them, Benja- 
min,* was interested with Lord Stirling in the Hibernia iron 

Benjamin Cooper married Charity, the daughter of Charles and Mary Hoff of 
Pittstown, in Hunterdon Co. The wife liied on the 17th of May, 1763, after 
giving birth to a boy, and both mother and child are buried in the old graveyard 
of the Bethlehem Presbyterian church. They each have separate monuments 
upon which is inscribed their ages as well as their names, the mother's being 
given hs seventeen and the child's as " 4 hours." 



Benjamin Cooper Escapes the Gallows. 575 

mine. In 1773 a great number of forged bills began to circulate 
in Morris county ; this led to the arrest and conviction of Doctor 
Barnabas Budd, Samuel Haines, David Reynolds and Daniel 
Cooper's son Benjamin, they confessing to having received the 
bills from one Ford, a clever counterfeiter. This principal, who 
was also arrested, managed to effect his escape, but his accom- 
plices were not so fortunate ; as has been shown, they were sen- 
tenced to expiate their crime on the gallows. Only one of them, 
Reynolds, who seems to have been the least guilty of all, was 
executed. The influential connections of the others bore with 
great weight upon the pardoning power, resulting in a reprieve 
on the very morning set apart for the executions. Cooper's escape 
was largely due to his having furnished information regarding 
the robbery of the treasury of the eastern division of the province 
of six hundred pounds, in the year 1768. He confessed to being 
an accessory to this crime. Ford, with the aid of two soldiers in 
the garrison at Amboy, having robbed the treasury, paying him, 
Cooper, three hundred pounds as his share of the proceeds. For 
this confession, together with the influence exerted by Lord 
Stirling, the son of the upright judge and venerable bridegroom 
was subsequently pardoned. 




CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

Some OM Manuscripts and Their Story — The Militia and Getier- 
al Trainings — Country 3Ierchants of the Olden Time. 

Spread upon the table at which I am writing lies a mass of 
interesting manuscripts. Dating from the days of Johannes 
Moelich down to those of the past generation, thej are as varied 
in form, appearance and original purposes of use as they are in 
age and color. These papers have at odd times been discovered 
in different corners and crannies of the Old Stone House. In 
handling them we are seemingly not only grasping the hands of 
all the men, women and children who have ever lived on the ^' Old 
Farm," but are also looking into the eyes and listening to the words 
of a by no means small minority of the Bedminster residents of 
the last century, as well as of worthies of reputation of the coun- 
ty and state. 

Let us take up at random some of these yellow, time-stained 
papers, and hear the story they have to tell of one hundred 
years ago. We will begin with a large, important looking docu- 
ment that fairly smells of authority. It announces in the most 
dignified and old-fashioned phraseology that the council and 
assembly, in consideration of the especial trust and confidence 
reposed in Guisbert Sutphen, have, by the command of ''His 
Excellency, the Governor," appointed him one of the justices to 
aid in the conservation of the peace in Somerset county. This 
was our old friend Guisbert, whose acquaintance we made at the 
time of the building of the Bedminster Reformed Dutch 
church. In the signature attached to his commission one 
can read with distinctness the character of New Jersey's first 
governor. The firm, even strokes that inscribed '' Wil. Living- 
ston " on this parchment were from no faltering hand, for vigor, 



Some Old Commissions. 577 

uprightness, and great tenacity of purpose are reflected from 
every line. The issuing of this commission must have been 
among the earliest of this war governor's acts, as it is dated the 
thirteenth of September, 1776. The attesting secretary of state 
is Charles Pettit, whom we have met before — at Camp Middle- 
brook in 1779, when he was deputy quartermaster-general under 
Greene. 

Guisbert Sutphen's official robe seems to have descended 
in the line of his family, for here is another commission of 
thirty years later appointing his son Peter justice of the peace. 
This sou's commission is shorn of about two-thirds of the legal 
verbiage that was considered necessary in his father's, though 
the powers granted are fully equal. The signature is that of 
Governor Joseph Bloomfield, a descendant of the Thomas Bloom- 
field who migrated in 1066 with John Pike from Newbury, 
Massachusetts, and aided in founding Woodbridge. This chief 
magistrate, who ruled from 1801 to 1802 and again from 1803 to 
1812, was a fine looking man, and, with his hair always well 
powdered and queued, presented in the gubernatorial chair a 
most dignified appearance. This time the attesting secretary of 
state is James Linn, the father of the young lady we saw danc- 
ing with Washington at the Pluckamin fete. Peter Sutphen's 
honors were not confined to the judiciary. We now come upon a 
third commission, dated in September, 1797, appointing him to 
the captaincy of a troop of horse in a Somerset battalion, com- 
manded by Major James Henry. It is signed by Richard How- 
e^ who was governor of the state from 1794 to 1801, and who 
during the war served in the continental line as major of Colonel 
Israel Shrieve's New Jersey battalion. He also commanded the 
New Jersey mUitia that aided in suppressing the Pennsylvania 
whiskey insurrection of 1794. His death in Trenton in 1803 
at the early age of forty-nine was much deplored. 

The close of the Revolution left the military instincts of the 

American people most actively alert, and, there no longer being a 

standing army, it was necessarily considered important for each 

state to have a thoroughly equipped militia. In New Jersey aU 

able-bodied men of proper age were enrolled, and until far into 

this century the rural citizen-soldier cut a splendid figure before 

the eyes of his friends and neighbors. For the country people, 
37 



578 The Story of an Old Farm. 

about him centred the acme of everything that was grand, mag- 
nificent and ostentatious, and the "trainings" of the militia were 
always important occasions and insured a great number of spec- 
tators. "General training days," that is, when the entire troops 
of the county were drilled, were considered holidays, and high 
carnival was held, attended often by license and disorder. In 
Somerset this field-day was frequently held at Pluckamin, the 
evolutions generally taking place on land now owned by J. 
Mehelm Brown, lying near the village. At such times all grades 
of society, white and colored, flocked to the field of Mars to wit- 
ness the grand doings, and everywhere was flourish, pomp and 
ceremony. The importance of the country lad, arrayed in a 
ranger's or cavalryman's uniform, as he strutted before the admir- 
ing glances of his sweetheart, was only surpassed by the magni- 
ficence of the mounted officers, who curvetted on their capari- 
soned horses in all the splendor and glitter of epaulettes of bullion 
and cocked hats with red, white, and black feathers. 

At the present time there are no public rural gatherings that 
approach to the old "general trainings" in prominence or glory. 
Old residents still remember, and enjoy telling of, the delight with 
which their boyish eyes looked upon the gala scene — of the 
flaunting banners, and the martial array of men in their starch 
and frippery ; of the square acres of people, all dressed in their 
Sunday best, before whom the troops deployed, marched and 
coimter-marched to the inspiring music of dnun, fife and bugle. 
Booths were set up for the sale of cakes, pies, beer, and ruiflj 
huckster wagons, laden with like goodies, were distributed about 
the field, and eating and drinking were by no means an unim- 
portant portion of the business of the day. When the drills and 
ceremonies of the militia were concluded all kinds of shows and 
games were instituted for the amusement of the people; gambling 
and horse racing were frequent features of the occasion, and, as 
the hours wore on, too often the power of rum asserted itself, and 
the day came to a close in turbulence and riot. 

A legislative enactment of 1815 reorganized the militia of New 
•Jersey. By this new system a company comprised sixty-five 
men, whose commissioned officers were a captain, lieutenant, and 
an ensign. The companies were formed into two battalions, 
commanded by majors, which, together, made a regiment under 



An Old Muster-Roll, 579 

a colonel. All the troops in each county constituted a brigade. 
The '^trainings" were annual; those of the companies occurred 
in April; the battalions, in May; the regiments, in June; while 
'^general trainings," or brigade drills, were ordered at the plea- 
sure of the brigadier-general. That the Old Stone House fur- 
nished a militia officer is shown by two saffron-colored muster- 
rolls on the table before me. They are inscribed : — 

The Master R )11 of the first coin[)iiiiy i)f the first B;itt:ilion of the Second Regi- 
ment in Soiiiersst Brigade. Danl Melick, C.ipt.; VVilliani Fuikerson, Lieut ; 
William Smitii, Insign. 

Then follow fifty-one names, among them those of Demund, 
Bunn, Lane, Powlison, Todd, Van Doren, and many others 
familiar to the Bedminster ears of to-day. Evidently there has 
been but little change in the resident families of the township 
since 1806, which is the date of these company rolls. One of 
these lists was written by John Blair, who seems to have been 
the general scrivener for the community, as numerous bonds, 
conveyances and other important papers in my hands are 
exhibits of his excellent penmanship. He was for many years a 
storekeeper, or country merchant, at the Larger Cross Roads, 
and considered a business man of more than ordinary intelligence. 

Lieutenant William Fuikerson purchased from Aaron Malick 
on the eleventh of April, 1800, the Bedminster tavern, with 
thirty acres of land extending to the north branch of the Raritan 
river, the consideration being three hundred and fifty-one pounds, 
proclamation money. By this time Aaron's son John had grown 
tired of keeping a ''public;" a few years later he removed with 
Ills family to Schoharie county, New York, where he died at the 
age of seventy-five, in the year 1834. Captain Fuikerson, as he 
was afterward known, continued to be the Bedminster tavern- 
keeper until his death about the year 1820. He is remembered 
as an honorable old gentleman, much respected in the neighbor- 
hood, though as he advanced in life he had a failing which was 
not uncommon with his generation. On infrequent occasions he 
had seasons of intemperance, lasting a week or ten days. At such 
times his mind ran very much on his military experiences, which 
had comprised Revolutionary as well as militia service; his habit 
was then to talk of himself, using often a favorite expression 
which he applied to any and everything that met his approval : 



580 The Story of as Old Farm. 

''I honor the movement." He used this phrase to such an 
extent that in later life the "Cross Roads" boys disrespectfully 
dubbed him— "The Old Movement." 

We can now turn from these militiamen, with their vengeful 
blades, to consider more peaceful pursuits, for our next old paper 
treats of tending flocks. Instead of the tramp of horse, accou- 
tred for war, we hear the multitudinous clatter of little hoofs, 
and view spacious meadows where foolish sheep with bent heads, 
and necks flaked in soft, yellow wool, are " nibbling sharp- 
toothed the rich, thick-growing blades." But here is the paper 
referred to ; it leads us to believe that Aaron's flocks were too 
great for his pasture supply : — 

Articles of Agreement made this twenty-ninth day and the year of our Lord 
one thousand Seven hundred and Eighty four with Elisha Lowrance that is to 
Let him have twenty one sheep valued at Nine Shillings per head, all said sheep 
the above mentioned Lowrance is to have for four years from this Date and he 
Doth Agree to give uijto Aaron Malick one pound of wool per head yearly, and 
Return the sheep at the Expiration of four years as Good as when he Received 
or the money if said Mealick Chases, as witness my hand this twenty Ninth day, 
1784. Elisha Lowrance. 

In turning over these old papers one finds among them a great 
number of bonds, notes and due bills, their amounts varying from 
a few shillings to several hundred pounds. These obligations 
are signed by many different persons, and bear no evidence as 
to their having been paid. Many of them were given by Aaron 
and Daniel Melick in payment of debts, and returned to them in 
the ordinary way of business on maturity. But how can we 
explain finding in the Old Stone House those that were not 
their obligations? If they had been held by members of the 
family as evidences of debt one would suppose that they would 
have been retained only in case of non-payment. That many 
of them must have been paid is proven by the well-known char- 
acter of the persons whose signatures they bear. As a rule they 
are not of those who would have permitted their promises to pay 
to have remained dishonored. Besides, at that time of a no-cir- 
culating-medium, notes were rarely issued by those unable to 
pay, especially in quiet country communities, where rogues were 
not in fashion and spendthrifts were rare. Fortunately the 
people of Bedminster in the last century did not need much 
monev. Bank bills were of course unknown. Before 1781 the 



Early Financial Institutions. 



581 



nearest place of deposit was at Baltimore, Maryland, then a 
place often thousand people. It was in that year that the bank 
of North America was established in Philadelphia, and three 
years later the bank of New York and the Massachusetts 
bank in Boston opened their doors for business. One 
of the earliest, if not the earliest, financial institution in our state 
was the "Bank of New Jersey" at New Brunswick, chartered 
in 1807, which was followed in 1812 by the "State Bank" at 
the same place. In Somerset county the cost of living was but 
little; land and taxes were low, ministers' salaries were small, 
farmers raised enough to supply their table and feed their stock, 
and made much of the clothing needed by their families. For 
what they had to buy at stores, blacksmith-shops and vendues, 
they were all in excellent credit, and notes and barter served as 
cash. 



.^i^^— o£r^ 'f^. 




liCx^dc^^^Q^ 




'*^. oUi 






■ ■ /tf / S^/C.it^^»-?,,'^-c*' 








582 The Story of an Old Farm. 

The members of the family in which we are interested were 
not infrequent purchasers at the coimtry stores. This is evi- 
dent from the multifarious paid bills to be seen among these 
relics of the quill on the table. We will examine a few of them, 
choosing several of various dates in order to learn the prices 
that prevailed, and that we may know for what manner of goods 
farmers went to the country merchant. We will begin with one 
of a store at Pluckamin, reproduced on the preceding page. 

This storekeeper is the same "Captain Bullion" whom we 
found standing behind his counter on that exciting Sunday in 
the winter of 1776, wh«n Washington and his soldier-lads, fresh 
from Princeton and Trenton, encamped at Pluckamin. Though 
over one hundred years old the ink that recorded the purchases 
entered in this bill is still distinctly black, and in the flourishes 
and figures it insci'ibed it has preserved an excellent exhibit of 
the bookkeeper's art of that time. John Boylan was a man of 
substance, and in 1788 was one of the Somerset county judges. 
He carried on an extensive mercantile business, having, besides 
his Pluckamin store, stands at Liberty Corner and at Vealtown 
— Bernards ville. 

About the year 1790 this Revolutionary store-keeper disap- 
pears from view, and for a number of years thereafter the lead- 
ing merchant of the vicinity was George I. Bergen, the son of 
John B. Bergen and Sarah Stryker of Cranbury. By his 
energy and perseverance he developed in his capacious Plucka- 
min store a very large trade which extended over a wide area of 
country, overriding competitors, and causing several store-keep- 
ers in the neighborhood to go out of business. After 1800 he 
dealt largely in pork and provisions for the European markets, 
the great armies at that time creating a brisk demand and high 
prices. Owing to the embargo of 1808, followed by the non- 
intercourse act, he became financially embarrassed, and a few 
years later was obliged to close up his business. Subsequently, 
in company with other New Jersey families, he settled in Illi- 
nois, where his descendants now live. 

Bergen's successor at Pluckamin was John Hunt, the son of 
tliat Colonel Stephen Hunt who commanded a New Jersey pro- 
^ isional regiment at the outset of the Revolution. He estab- 



Country Storekeepers and Their Wares. 583 

lished his business before 1806 as is indicated by the following 
biU :— 

Pluckarain May 1, 1806. 
Capt. Daniel Mellick 





Bought of John 


Hunt. 




U yds Cloth 




22 6 


£1 13 9 


3 Scanes Silk 




6 


1 6 


1 D twist 






6 


Ij Doz Buttons 




2 9 


4 2 


1 Vest Shape 






7 6 


3 Yds B'lk Velvet 




7 


1 1 


2 D Holland 




3 


6 


1 Doz Molds 






3 


1 pr Gloves 






6 


li yds Ribbon 




1 3 


1 11 


ll D D 




1 6 


2 3 


1 Paper pins 






1 6 


11 Buttons 






1 2 



£ 4 7 6 

Aaron and Daniel Melick did not confine their purchasing to 
near-by stores. The sale and shipment of the products of their 
tannery and farm required their making frequent journeys to 
tide-water at New Brunswick. This city was at that time, and 
for many years later, the centre of an active trade, and possessed 
numerous large general stores. We may be sure that the 
wwmen of the stone house had plenty of commissions to be filled 
when their husbands went " to town." That the visitors did not 
return empty-handed is evidenced by the bills that have been 
preserved, dated at New Brunswick. Here is one that is inter- 
esting as showing the great variety of goods that could be bought 
under one roof: — 

New Brunswick, Nov. 4th, 1800. 
Mr. Melick 

Bought of Sarah Brush. 

J Dozen China cups & saucers 

1 Tea pot, 4 6, 1 Sugar Bowel, 3 6, 1 Cream p. 2 

I Doz. Supe plates 3 3 

h Doz. Blue edge Do 3 3 

i Oval Dish 2 

I of Swansdown 

i of Flannel 2 9 

1 Stick of twist 

1 Doz. Small Buttons Id 

2 Btindannah Hankerchiefs 6 6 
S pains of 8 By 10 Glass lOd 
1 lb. Hyson Skin tea 






12 








10 








3 


3 





3 


3 





2 








5 


6 





1 


10 








6 





1 








13 








6 


8 





8 






£ 4 
9 
12 



9 



£ 4 10 
2 


9 



£ 6 10 


9 



584 Thk Story of an Old Farm. 

i Doz. 7 By 9 Glass 8d 

Sundreys of wood ware 

To U Bushels of Coarse Salt 8 

To Cash 



Commencing with the year 1785 New Brunswick experienced 
a remarkable era of prosperity. It continued until 1834, when 
the opening for business of the Delaware and Rai'itan canal and 
the New Jersey railroad paralyzed industries that the inhabit- 
ants of the city had hoped were to be perpetual. It prospered 
not only from the fact of its being in the heart of a rich agricul- 
tural, long-settled country, but because, being located on the 
Raritan near the head of navigation, it was the terminus of sev- 
eral business thoroughfares, some of which extended all the way 
to Pennsylvania. The traffic across the state between these 
years was something enormous. Great Conestoga wagons, 
painted blue, from Pennsylvania, and others almost as large from 
Hunterdon county, passed daily over the AmwellroadtoNew Bruns- 
wick, many of them drawn by four and six horses, all heavily 
laden with flour, flax, grain and other produce. The wagons 
conveying the productions of Sussex, Warren, Morris and Somer- 
set counties came by way of Bound Brook, and so on, down tK^ 
Raritan valley. It is said that at one time on an account being 
kept of the teams passing through Middlebrook in one day they 
were found to number five hundred. Hence, probably, no place 
in the middle colonies, outside of New York and Philadelphia, 
contained busier storekeepers, mechanics and tradesmen of all 
kinds than did this Middlesex city ; every one had employment, 
and its wharves were scenes of busy activity. 

All the blessings flowing from the Raritan river as an artery 
of commerce did not at that time alone fall upon New Bruns- 
wick. One mile above the city was another busy shipping point 
— Raritan Landing. Seated amid the rural quiet of its grassy 
surroundings, this place at the present time offers no indication 
of the commercial prosperity that gave it an active business 
experience of nearly half a century. The writer has often heard 
his father tell of his first visit to New Brunswick, in abolit the 
year 1825, when he rode from the '* Old Farm" on a load of 



Raritan Landing and Nkw Brunswick. 585 

corn, in the company of an elder brother. On leaving Bound 
Brook, instead of crossing the bridge and continuing along the 
" pike," they travelled the river road, unconsciously following in 
the footsteps of their great-grandfather, Johannes, when, seventy- 
five years before, he had first made his way down the Raritan 
valley. On reaching the " Landing " the load of corn was sold 
to Michael Garrish, a prominent buyer and shipper of produce 
who had several warehouses facing the road running from the 
river road to the '^ Landing " bridge. They found this connect- 
ing road well built up — the north side almost continuously so — 
with blacksmith shops, cooper-shops, stores and warehouses. At 
the bridge end was a large grist-mill operated by Miles Smith, a 
wealthy miller who lived in considerable style at the near-by 
" Ross Hall. " Facing the main highway, and opposite this 
connecting road, was the stand, or store, of John Pool, whose 
residence was that handsome colonial stone mansion on the hill, 
built by Cornelius Lowe, Jr. in 1741, and which, still in excel- 
lent preservation, furnishes a most pleasing example of colonial 
architecture. Mr. Pool carried on an extensive business with 
the farmers and country merchants, buying their produce and 
supplying them with salt, plaster and heavy goods. 

The merchants and forwarders of New Brunswick occupied 
broad lots extending from Burnet and Water streets to the river. 
Their retail stores and dwellings, which were often in one build- 
ing, faced the streets. In the rear their warehouses fronted a 
continuous wooden wharf, or bulkhead, broad enough to admit 
of the passage of teams ; frequently the wharves and streets were 
connected by a private alley. Here on this river-front a lucra- 
tive trade was carried on which amassed for not a few merchants 
considerable fortunes. On Water street were Matthew Freeman, 
afterward Ayres & Freeman, who remained in business till 1828, 
Josiah Stout, Samuel Holcomb, Peter P. Runyon, Samuel Metlar 
and others. On Burnet street, among others, were Colonel John 
Neilson, James Richmond, Samuel Brash, James Schureman, and 
James Bennet, afterward James Bishop & Co. All of these mer- 
chants owned sloops — some of the larger dealers owned two or 
three — so at all times there was a very respectable fleet of small 
craft moored along the Raritan river front. These vessels car- 
ried the produce of the back country to New York, and returned 



586 The Story of as Old Farm. 

with cargoes of salt, plaster, barrelled-fish and other general 
merchandise which were sold from the Burnet and Water street 
stores to the farmers and country storekeepers. 

Up to the time of steamboats, many sloops, that were built for 
that purpose, served as packets for carrying passengers. When 
we accompanied Johannes to Perth Amboy in 1752 we learned 
something of the sloop navigation of that period. As the cen- 
tury waned many improvements had been made that added to 
the comfort of travelling by water, until " a cabin fitted up with 
a tea-table " was no longer considered so luxurious an appoint- 
ment as to warrant its being advertised to attract passengers. 
The year 1788 saw a great revival of business throughout the 
middle colonies, and the era of stagnation which had continued 
since the close of the war gave way to one of activity and enter- 
prise. In New York city, in the few months of the open and 
mild winter of 1778-9, the change was both sudden and extraor- 
dinary. Houses and stores sprang up in every direction, and 
the country roads north of Chambers street began to take on the 
aspect of a town. With the return of prosperity came a marked 
increase in the number of travellers, and from this time dates the 
introduction of large passenger sloops with much heavier ton- 
nage and greater breadth of beam. Often a vessel of seventy 
tons burden and less than sixty feet in length would be 
twenty-two feet wide ; as the cabin occupied much of the space 
below deck the passenger accommodations equalled those found 
on a full-rigged ship of three hundred tons, built for crossing the 
ocean. When wind and tide served, these short, broad and 
shallow sloops could make the passage to New York within about 
four hours, but with adverse winds and bad weather the voyage 
was often prolonged for two days. 

It would appear that the comforts of sloop travel on the Dela- 
ware at the beginning of this century were much less than what 
travellers experienced on the New York end of the journey. 
From 1800 to 1810, on what was known as the Amboy and Bur- 
lington route the water passage from the latter place to Phila- 
delphia was by the little sloop " Mayflower," owned and com- 
manded by the then celebrated taciturn Captain Jacob Myers. 
Often twenty-four hours were consumed between the two places, 
though no provision was made to supply the passengers with food 



Sloop Travel on the Delaware. 587 

and light. No certainty was ever felt by travellers as to the 
hour of starting. They were generally required to be on board 
at seven in the morning, but when ready to cast off the lines, did 
a load of apples or country produce appear on the wharf the 
sailing was postponed until the new freight was on board, and 
until it was very sure that no more was in sight. Thus it was 
often midday before the " Mayflower " hauled out into the stream 
and her passengers commenced bobbing and dodging to keep 
their heads clear of the ever-moving boom. If the comforts of 
the voyage at the New York end of the route were greater, so, 
owing to the open water, were the dangers. The "New Jersey 
Journal," No. 787, recites that on Saturday the tenth of Novem- 
ber, 1798, one of the Elizabethtown and New York packet 
sloops capsized off Bergen Point, drowning eight passengers, 
men, women and children, from Union and Morris counties. 

In the year 1807 Fulton astonished the world by paddling in 
the "Clermont" from New York to Albany, averaging five miles 
an hour irrespective of winds and currents. A few years later 
John R. and Robert James Livingston purchased from Robert R. 
Livingston and Robert Fulton, who owned the exclusive legisla- 
tive privileges of operating steamboats in New York waters, the 
right to establish a steam line from New Brunswick to New York. 
They constructed at a cost of twenty-six thousand dollars a boat 
one hundred and thirty feet long and twenty feet beam, which 
they named the "Raritan," and ran as a packet between those 
places, touching at Elizabethtown-point and at other landings on 
the Jersey and Staten Island shores. For two years she w^as 
operated at a loss, but eventually the enterprise became pro- 
fitable. 

This induced Colonel Aaron Ogden to build a steamboat called 
the "Seahorse," about one third the dimensions of the "Raritan," 
which he ran from Elizabethtown-point, from where he had been 
operating a sloop ferry for a number of years. As Colonel Ogden 
had no right to ply in New York waters the trips of the "Sea- 
horse" ended off Bedloe's Island, where passengers were trans- 
ferred to a boat propelled by horse-power, which conveyed them 
to the city. Thomas Gibbons, an eminent lawyer and planter of 
Georgia, was the owner of an undivided half of the "Ancient 
Ferry" upon which the ''Seahorse" was running. Colonel Ogden 



588 The Story of an Old Farm. 

being the owner of the other half, and the lessee for a term of 
years of Gibbons' moiety. Upon the expiration of this lease 
Ogden and Gibbons quarrelled as to the conditions of a partner- 
ship to which Gibbons insisted upon being admitted. This 
resulted some time previous to 1815 in Gibbons bringing out a 
new boat, the "Bellona," which was soon plying to New Brunswick 
in connection with the "Old Union Line" to Philadelpliia. The 
company operated two lines of transit between that city and New 
York. The first was by post-chaise, one leaving number 145 
Broadway each morning at five o'clock, proceding to Whitehall 
ferry and crossing to Staten Island; thence to Blazing Star where 
the Kills was crossed, then on through Woodbridge, New Bruns- 
wick and Princeton, crossing the Deiavvare at Bristol, and arriv- 
ing in Philadelphia at five o'clock the same evening. Before me as 
I write is an old advertisement of the second route of this "Union 
Line " dated in 1819. It announces : — 

The Vice-President's steamboat Nautihis will leave New York every day (Sun- 
days excepted) from Whitehall Wharf, at eleven o'clock a. m. From her tlie pas- 
sengers will he received without delay into the superior fast-sailing steamboat 
Bellona, Capt. Vanderbelt, for Brunswick; from thence in Post Chaises to Tren- 
ton, where they lodge, and arrive next morning at ten o'clock in Philadelphia 
with the commodious and fast-sailing steamboat, Philadelphia, Capt. Jenkins. 

The announcement that passengers would be received by the 
"Bellona" at Staten Island was an advertising fiction, the exchange 
being made at the mouth of the Kills. As Gibbons still was 
without the right to navigate the New York waters with steam 
he ran his boat in connection with the ferry licensed to ply 
between New York and Staten Island. 

Doubtless, travellers by the " Old Union Line " considered 
that the height of comfort had been reached in the transit from 
the Hudson to the Delaware. The "Bellona" was a small single- 
decked, plainly-finished steamboat, but, together with her sister 
boat, the "Thistle," put on the route soon after, was considered a 
marvel of speed and beauty. Compared with a boat of the 
present day she presented but a mean appearance. Her cabin 
accommodations were meagre, being confined to a small saloon 
abaft the wheel on the main deck. No soft cushions, uphol- 
stered chairs or curtained windows added to the comfort of the 
passengers. Ladies sat on hard-backed benches, while men 



The Steamboat "Bellona." 589 

were well content with round wooden stools. The speed of " the 
fast sailing and superior steamboat Bellona " did not exceed from 
ten to twelve miles an hour, but this her passengers thought 
exhilarating as compared with the slow and uncertain transit of 
the sloops of a few years previous. Her captain was the father 
of the late William H. Vanderbilt — the "Old Commodore" — 
then a long, lank youth of twenty-four years of age. As the 
commander of this fine vessel he was looked up to by the travel- 
ling public, and he enjoyed the princely income of fifty dollars a 
month for his services. The wife of' Captain Corneel," as he was 
called — whom he had married when he was but nineteen — kept 
''Bellona Hall," a small tavern on the steamboat-landing at New 
Brunswick, where she proved to be a most popular and capable 
hostess. She saved much money, which later contributed to 
assist her husband in putting on the river opposition boats 
whereby he laid the foundation of his great fortune. 

We must not permit ourselves to reflect with contempt upon 
the pride with which our fathers and grandfathers walked the 
deck of the "Bellona," flattering themselves, perhaps, with the idea 
that in her the science of locomotion had attained to its full per- 
fection. In the picture one's mind draws of the progress and 
development of the means of river navigation, from the sloop to 
the magnificent craft of the present day, the men of 1819 
and their little steamers do not occupy a middle distance ; on the 
contrary, they are well in the foreground, for their strides from 
what had been, covered much more space than have those of 
their posterity in reaching to-day's apparent perfection of 
transit. 

In the sloop age the New Brunswick masters did not secure 
all the passengers. Like vessels sailed from Elizabethtown- 
point, to which some stages ran, and from early days there had 
been a stage line across country to the Hudson. In 1772 John 
Meserau's " Flying Machine " was advertised to leave Paulus 
Hook thrice weekly for Philadelphia. This " Machine," like the 
stages we saw at Perth Amboy in 1752, was stiU a country 
wagon, but it had four horses, with changes, and was supposed to 
fly over the ruts and stumps at such a high rate of speed as to 
reach the Delaware within two days. In the same year — 1772 
— an act of the assembly authorized a lottery to raise one thou- 



590 The Story of an Old Farm. 

sand and fifty pounds to pay for gravelling the causeway over the 
Newark meadows. But the patient colonists were obliged to 
wait two years before couunencing the work, as it was not until 
1774 that the king's sanction was obtained. Previous to this 
improvement being made the passage of this bit of road was 
attended with both delay and danger. Passengers by the " Fly- 
ing Machine " were forced to cross from New York to Paulus 
Hook the night before starting, which counteracted to a consi- 
derable extent the advantage of flying overland instead of sailing 
leisurely by sloop. 

Elkanah Watson, who journeyed from New York to Philadel- 
phia in 1 784, recorded his experiences in a journal. He crossed 
the Hudson on a cold winter's day in an open ferry-boat, and 
the Hackensack and the Passaic on the ice. The first night was 
spent at Newark, which he called a handsome town with spa- 
cious streets bordered by trees, and the surrounding country dis- 
tinguished for its orchards and advanced culture. The next 
journey was by stage-sleigh as far as Princeton, and on the third 
day Philadelphia was reached. Another traveller, of juat ten 
years later, made some interesting notes on his journey. He 
recites that after spending an hour and a half on the Hudson 
ferry he left Paulus Hook by the coach '^ Industry" paying five 
dollars for his seat. In crossing the cedar swamp, before reach- 
ing Newark, he made the acquaintance of New Jersey mosqui- 
tos, '* which," as he observes, " bit our legs and hands exceed- 
ingly ; where they fix they will continue, if not disturbed, till 
they swell four times their ordinary size, when they absolutely 
fall ofi" and burst from their fidlness." The Passaic river was 
crossed by the '' Industry "on a " scoue," propelled by 
pulling a rope which was fastened to the further shore. 
He calls New Brunswick a very pleasant to\^Ti. The Rari- 
tan bridge had been carried away by a storm, but the 
coach and six horses was ferried in a " scoue " in six 
minutes. The want of a bridge over the Raritan did not 
long delay travel, as the journal of a tourist of the following year, 
in speaking of New Brunswick, mentions the "very neat and com- 
modious wooden bridge that has been thrown across the Raritan 
river." Our first traveller's stage-coach did not go beyond New 
Brunswick, a wagon without springs being used as far as Prince- 



Introduction of Mail Coaches. 591 

ton. The road was so full of deep holes and rolling stones that 
on reaching the college town the passengers had been so badly 
shaken that many of them were sick and could hardly stand. 

Coaches at that time were yet few, being the exception rather 
than the rule. The public conveyances, generally, were long- 
bodied stage-wagons without doors, windows or panels. Leathern 
curtains were letdown to keep out the rain, and entrance was had 
over the whiffle-trees and front wheels, the passengers clamber- 
ing back over the intervening benches. After the present cen- 
tury came in, land travel was made more expeditious and the 
discomforts much lessened. Heavy English mail-coaches, 
swung on huge leather springs, were introduced, and more fre- 
quent changes of horses greatly diminished the time between 
New York and Philadelphia. The traffic so rapidly increased 
that, long before the advent of the railroad, how to carry the 
many passengers became a no inconsiderable problem. 

In the palmy days of road and steamboat travel the hour that 
heralded the arrival of the southern coaches was the most impor- 
tant one of the day for New Brunswick citizens. As the time 
di*ew near, a crowd gathered where the taverns clustered in 
Albany street, the eyes of each one of the expectant throng 
bending in the same direction. Presently the eager cry, " here 
they come ! here they come !" passed from mouth to mouth. 
Then with loud huzzas the six-horse coaches, piled with luggage, 
topped with people, and coated with dust, came swinging around 
the corner of George into Albany street. With much clatter of 
hoof and rumble of wheel, cracking of whip and blowing of horn, 
the long line of lurching vehicles, often numbering thirty, rapidly 
approached, until with a final flourish of whip and blast of 
bugle their drivers drew rein in front of the City Hotel and the 
White Hall and Bell taverns. Then came hubbub and excite- 
ment, for Albany street was alive with an animated multitude. 
To the New Brunswick people it meant more than the arrival of 
passengers ; with them came letters, papers and news from the 
outside world. The Albany street arrival was a scene witnessed 
only during those months when the steamboats were not running. 
When navigation was open, the coaches on entering town turned 
down New street to Burnet street, thence to the landing, where 
the steamboat was waiting to continue the journey. The last 



592 The Story of an Old Farm. 

stop made before reaching New Brunswick was at Enos 
Ay res' well-known tavern, five miles south of the town at 
Dunham's corners, a hamlet whose godfather was Captain Jehu 
Dunham. Regular travellers by the road were for a time much 
interested in this hostelrie because of its landlord's daughter, 
who before she was twenty-eight years old had had four hus- 
bands. She is said to have been very beautiful, and to have 
secured her numerous consorts by physical rather than mental 
perfections. Her conversational powers were limited, but 
through the daily scanning of over two hundred coach passen- 
gers she probably acquired the habit of " looking unutterable 
things." 

Before turning our backs on New Brunswick we will do a little 
more shopping, and thus learn something of the prices at which 
di'y and wet goods were sold in 1809 : 

New Brunswick 23d Augt. 1809. 
Mr. Daniel Melick 

Bot. of Van Dorn & Ditmars 



14 lbs Brown Sugar 






6 7 


lbs 




£0 


12 





J lb. Soushong tea 






8 








4 





h " Hyson Skin " 






8 








4 





i " Ground Coffee 






2 








2 





2 Bus. Coarse Salt 






7 








14 





1 " Fine Do 






6 








6 





4 Yds Super Calico 




3 


6 








14 





IJ " Coarse " 




1 


9 








2 


2 


1 Bus fine sand 














1 







£2 


19 


2 




Eeceived 


payment 


in 


full 


















Van Dorn & 


Ditmars. 






CHAPTER XXXIX. 

The Old Papers Continue Their Story — The Beverend John Dur- 
yea of the Bedminster Beformed Dutch Church — The Tax 
on Carriages — Somerset s Paupers — Daniel MelicWs Voyage 
to Georgia — Slaveholding on The Old Farm. 

Aladdin, standing in the cave of the magic lamp, could with 
difficulty decide into which glittering pile of gems his hand 
should be thrust. We, too, feel this embarras de richesse in the 
presence of our heap of interesting manuscripts on the table. 
When each scrap speaks so eloquently of past generations, it is 
not easy to determine which one shall next claim our attention. 
At a venture we will take up a package of narrow papers that 
time has tanned to the hue of old gold. Ah! on looking through 
them we find that they do not belie their color, as they all treat 
of money. They are receipts for salary given by the Reverend 
John Duryea, the third clergyman of the Bedminster Reformed 
Dutch church. They extend over a period of several months of 
the years 1789 and 1790, and are issued to the church treasurer 
and to individual members of the congregation, in some instances 
being but for a few shillings. The domine evidently in part 
collected his own salary and often had difficulty in doing so. 
Even the treasurer was not always on time in his payments, as is 
made plain by the following exhibit : — 

Received Bedminster August 20th, 1789 of the Treasurer of the Congregation 
Mr. Guisbert Sutphen Esqr. the sum of Seventeen Pounds Thirteen Shillings & 
three pence, part of the Sallery which was Due the 8th of July 1789. 

£17, 13, 3. John Duryea. 

Reed. Bedminster Sept. 1, 1789 of Mr. Guisbert Sutphen, Esq. the sum of 
Two Pounds Eleven Shillings which was Due the 8th of July 1789. 

£2, 11, 0. John Duryea. 

38 



594 The Story of an Old Farm. 

This collecting by the minister- from members of the congrega- 
tion must have been attended by much inconvenience, as his par- 
ishioners were widely distributed, and their subscriptions, as 
is shown by a list in my possession, were often exceedingly 
small. That they were not inclined to pay even these meagre 
sums is told us by a writer in the tenth number of the Somerville 
magazine, '^Our Home." He narrates that when the invitation 
to preach was extended to Mr. Duryea the call was conveyed 
to him by John Vroom,. an explanation being made that there 
was but little money in the congregation but that all his tem- 
poral wants should be provided for. He preached several months 
without any payment being made, whereupon, after a regular 
morning sermon he thus addressed his people : — " You made cer- 
tain promises to me if I would preach for you. Several sermons 
have been given and I have performed my part. A bar- 
gain thus made becomes a sacred contract. If you refuse, you 
are a congregation of story-tellers ; and you, John Vroom, are the 
biggest liar of them all." From such a circumstance we may 
fairly deduce that while this preacher was under the sounding 
board restful sleep did not unbidden ''creep from pew to pew." 

Jacob R. Hardenbergh, the Revolutionary pastor of Bed- 
minster church, resigned in 1781 and removed to Rosendale on 
the Hudson, where he preached until 1786, when he was called 
to the presidency of Queen's, now Rutgers' college. For over 
two years the Bedminster people were without a minister, when 
Theodore F. Romeyn, the grandson of Domine Theodorus Jacobus 
Frelinghuysen, was called. His pastorate included the Raritan 
congregation, the Readington people having before this time 
secured a minister of their own. On the death of Mr. Romeyn 
in 1 785 the two congregations united in calling the Reverend 
John Duryea. Born in 1760, he was licensed to preach by the 
New York synod in May, 1 784. In this, his first charge, two 
thirds of his services were given to the Raritan congregation and 
one third to Bedminster, and he was bound by his call to preach 
alternately in Dutch and English. Mr. Duryea was a devout 
man and loved to preach, but his preaching did not satisfy the 
more intelligent portion of his people. His sermons were extem- 
pore and he was not inclined to over study in their preparation. 
Perhaps this rugged divine was apt at times to be too abrupt 



Last Century's Carriage Tax. 595 

to suit all of his hearers ; at any rate dissatisfaction with his pas- 
torate spread, forcing him to resign his charge over the two 
churches in the autumn of 1788. At that time the Bedminster 
congregation severed its connection with that of Raritan, and Mr, 
Duryea continued to serve Bedminster for one year in connection 
with an unorganized body of hearers at White House and Pot- 
tersville in Hunterdon county. He then removed to Essex 
county, New Jersey, and finally died at the Notch, near the vil- 
lage of Little Falls, in 1836. 

In the last century it was not usual for farmers in Somerset 
county to own carriages. As a rule they were content with their 
white covered farm wagons, the bodies of which, on Sundays, were 
strewn with clean straw, while chairs from the kitchen served as 
seats. Aaron Malick in the year 1796 appears to have consid- 
ered himself well-enough-to-do to warrant his riding in a four- 
wheeled carriage, and to warrant his paying the government a 
tax for the privilege, which at that time was a necessary con- 
sequence of such a luxury. Here is the proof: — 

THIS IS TO CERTIFY, THAT Aaron Melick of Bedminster in the 
County OF Somerset — hath paid the Duty of two Dollars upon a four 
Wheel Carriage called A light Waggon owned by him, having framed posts 
& A Top, & resting on wooden spars — to be drawn by two Horses — for the 
Conveyance of more than one Person ; for the Year to end on the 30th Day of 
September 1797. 

Samuel Annin 
September 19, 96. Collector of the Revenue, 

Receid Sept. 1796. 10th Division of New Jersey. 

This carriage tax was imposed by congress in the general 
impost bill of 1794. It created much dissatisfaction, especially 
among the republicans. The carriage-makers claimed this tax 
to be unconstitutional, and carried the question to the supreme 
court ; but the government was sustained, and the law remained 
in force until Jefferson and the republicans came into power. 
The impost on pleasure-wagons was removed in 1802, together 
with many other obnoxious impositions ; the eflfort caused a bit- 
ter contest in congress between the federalists and republicans, 
the debate lasting for five days. The result was considered a 
great triumph for Jefferson's administration, and, of course, was 
bitterly deplored by the federalists ; they urged that the car- 
riage tax had been only paid by the rich, and quoted in proof 



596 The Story of an Old Farm. 

the fact that Virginia had six hundred and sixty-six coaches 
paying tax while Massachusetts had but ninety-nine. 

Now turn your eyes, and we will look on poverty. He is 
poor whose expenses exceed his income. This is the kind of 
poverty that harasses a man and makes him truly miserable, for 
sooner or later he is struggling in the vain endeavor to keep up 
a hollow show. Such a person is waging an unequal fight 
against that well equipped foe, reality, armed with the weakest 
of all weapons, pretence. The Bedminster citizens now brought 
into view by our old papers are not of this unhappy class. They 
have robbed poverty of at least one of its stings, by honestly 
acknowledging their indigence. They are the county paupers. 
In the last century there were in New Jersey neither alms- 
houses nor poor-farms. In some counties, notably in Hudson, it 
was the custom to sell the paupers at auction to the lowest bid- 
der ; the amount bid was paid to the buyer by the over- 
seers of the poor, which bound him to mend the pauper's clothes, 
to furnish him with a good bed, with washing, lodging and vic- 
tuals for one year, during which time the pauper was to work 
for the buyer as much as he was able. All new clothing was 
supplied by the county. 

The Old Stone House for three generations furnished over- 
seers of the poor for Bedminster township. After the jus- 
tices of the peace had passed upon the application of a 
pauper for maintenance it was the duty of the overseers 
to provide for the impoverished-one a comfortable home, 
generally with a farmer. The amount paid for a year's support 
— judging from the bills before me — varied considerably, depend- 
ing somewhat upon the condition of the paupers, and their abil- 
ity to aid the families with whom they w^ere living. On the 
twenty-fifth of January, 1797, James Wintersteen received from 
" Daniel Melick, one of the overseers of the poor," forty-two 
shillings " in full for keeping Widow Mahew ;" while on the 
eighteenth of March, of the same year, Simon Hagerman, Jr., 
received seven pounds, ten shillings, " for keeping Leaney Rush 
a pauper on s'd Town." On the twenty-third of December, 
1803, Elizabeth Castner was paid '' Twenty Dollars in full for 
the support of Salley for the year Ending next Town meeting 
Day," while the following bill shows that in the next year double 
that amount was paid for a pauper's support: — 



The Care of Bedminster Paupers. 597 

Mr. Dan'l Melick, overseer of the poor for Bedminster, Dr. 
1804 To Charles Berger 

May 5 To Keeping Margaret Biderman a pauper 54 

weeks at 76 cents pr week 40 50 

Snuff 25 



HO 75 
Rec'd May 14th 1804 from Dan'l Melick 
the above sum of Forty Dollars and seventy five cents 
for my father, 

Catherine Berger. 

It was the duty of the overseers not only to secure comfortable 
homes for their charges, but to clothe them and to furnish them 
with extra necessaries. Thus we find that on the seventh of 
January, 1804, John Demund was paid '• $2.50 for making a 
suit of clothes for Gideon Berry, a pauper." We may suppose 
that this charge did not include the cloth. On the twenty-sixth 
of April, the same year, Levi Sutton, a farmer living near the 
lower lime-kiln on the Peapack road, was paid ''One Dollar and 
twenty -five cents for lOibs of pickle pork for Joseph Richard- 
son last fall." The next bill is interesting because of its intro- 
ducing us to a prominent Bedminster citizen of that day : — 

Mr. Daniel Melick, Overseer of the Poor 

1796 To Nicholas Arrosmith Dr. 

Augt 3d To 2h Yds Lining 3 £ 7 6 

" 2 Sks thread 2 4 

" 1 Thimble 3 



Deer For the Widow Wortman 8 1 

Deer 29 To 2 yds Coating 8 6 17 

1797 For Anny Oppey 

Feby 2 To paid Jacob Van De venter 18 

For the Widow Wortman 

£2 3 1 
Rec'd of Daniel Melick overseer of the poor, the above 
Sum of Two pounds 3-1 Nich's Arrosmith. 

Nicholas Arrosmith was a contemporary of Daniel Melick, and 
a near neighbor, living just over the brook. In 1792 he pur- 
chased from Robert Gaston the property now known as Schomp's 
mills, rebuilding the grist and saw mills, and improving the 
water-power. He also farmed extensively, and kept a general 
store which was located on the east side of the Peapack road, 
just beyond the bridge. At that time the road mounted the hill 



598 The Story of an Old Farm. 

instead of following the bank of the river as at present. Mr. 
Arrosmith was without doubt the most conspicuous Bedminster 
resident of that day ; he was a judge of the county court, filled 
many other positions of honor and trust in the community, and 
at his death left a large estate. 

A bill of Doctor Robert Henry, dated the twentieth of Sep- 
tember, 1756, "For medicine and attendance done for Mrs. 
Biderman, one pound," shows that the paupers when ill were 
not neglected. Doctor Henry graduated at Princeton in 1776, 
and in the spring of the following year was commissioned as sur- 
geon's mate in the general hospital, continental army, as assist- 
ant to Doctor Cochran, whom we met at Morristown in 1780. 
He afterwards entered the line, serving four years in Colonel 
Read's regiment. General Poor's brigade. He was in several 
engagements, and in the fight at Croton river Colonel Greene of 
Rhode Island and Major Flagg were killed by his side, and he 
himself was wounded and taken prisoner. He continued in the 
service until the army was disbanded, when he settled in Bed- 
minster, where he practiced medicine until his death in 1800. 
So it is that our old papers tell us how the Bedminster poor were" 
cared for in sickness and in health. They do more than this ; 
they bring us to the paltry bed of the pauper when death has 
burst the prison bars of his poverty, and made him the equal of 
princes. 



/: 




Poor Thomas Carey ! " Rattle his bones over the stones, only 
a pauper that nobody owns." We suspect that he had but 
little honor while living, and when dying, perhaps no friendly 
voice spoke comfort to his soul, or gave him the melting tear of 



An Attorney and His Bill. 599 

pity. But now, after being many years dead, his name, at least, 
shall be rescued from oblivion. Whatever immortality it may 
be insured by appearing on these pages can be charged to the 
fortuitous circumstance of its having been necessary to buy a 
robe that he might lie down decently to his long night's sleep. 

While each township was willing to take excellent care of the 
poor within its own borders, they were all exceedingly jealous of 
having on their hands those for whom it was not properly their 
duty to provide. Before Joseph Richardson was able to gratify 
his taste for pickled pork at Bedminster's expense, the courts 
were called upon to decide whether it was not Hillsborough 
township that should assume his maintenance. Here is our 
means of knowing this fact : — 

Somerset Sessions. 
The Inhabitants of ] ■ - 

Bedminster On appeal from an order of 

vs }- Removal of Joseph Richardson 

The Inhabitants of | A pauper. 

Hillsborough J 

Rec'd January 4th 1804 of Mr. Daniel Melick overseer of the poor of 
the township of Bedminster the sum of six dollars as a fee for arguing the above 
cause. Thos. P. Johnson. 

The attorney retained for this suit, Thomas Potts Johnson, 
was the second son of William Johnson, an Irish emigrant who 
was an early settler in Hunterdon county. His mother was a 
daughter of Stacy Potts of Trenton, at whose house the Hessian 
Colonel Rail died in 1776. He married a daughter of Robert 
Stockton, studied law with Richard Stockton, and was admitted 
to the bar in 1794. Lawyer Johnson's practice soon grew to be 
considerable in Hunterdon and Somerset counties, due largely to 
a natural eloquence and an unusually retentive memory. He 
died in 1838 in his seventy-eighth year. 

The counsellor may have plead the Richardson case to the sat- 
isfaction of his clients, but his argument did not secure a ver- 
dict. Had he prevailed perhaps his fee would have been 
larger. He was well treated by the township otherwise, as is 
exemplified by the following receipt of John Meldrum, who for 
many years was the popular host of a -Somerville tavern known 
as the Somerset House, which stood on the site of the present 
Van Arsdale's hotel, called yet *^ The Somerset." 



4 


£340 


.2 


2 8 




4 




4 




£ 9 16 




4 



600 The Story of an Old Farm. 

6th Jany ■) Rec'd of Daniel Melick overseer of poor, 11 shillings for a treat to- 
1804 J the Lawyers after the tryal of Joseph Richardson. 

John Meld rum. 

In the winter of 1792-93 Daniel Melick went on a trading 
voyage to Georgia. Here is his bill for freight and passage. 

Mr. Daniel Melick to W. Kennedy Dr. 

To freight of goods from York to Savannah 
To 16 Barrels brandy 

4Hhd'8 Do 

1 Cask shoes 

his passage 

Savannah 1st Deer. 1792 
Received payment 

£ 10 

W. Kennedy. 

He sailed from New York late in December, and preserved a 
faithful account of his journey, making daily entries in a journal, 
the pages of which I am now turning over. The first few leaves 
are missing, the diary commencing on Friday the fourth of Janu- 
ary when he had landed at Newport Bridge, a few miles from 
Savannah, and complains that the extremely hot weather had 
made hira ill. On Sunday he walked out with Mr. Rodes to the 
ferry, about five miles away, and then on "to Mr. Peacock's 
plantation to meet his wife and children." On the fourteenth 
he attended the trial of three negroes, and on the next day again 
visited the Peacock plantation — this time in company with Mr. 
Thurber, of Princeton — and '' went in the large bam to see the 
negroes work." On the seventeenth he bought three barrels of 
rice and put them in Mr. Walker's warehouse, and two days 
later a horse-race claimed his attention, where there was an 
exciting brush for thirty guineas. 

On the twenty-first our diarist was present at the trial of twa 
negro women for " poisoning their mistress." They were found 
guilty, and sentenced to have their right ears cut ofi" and to be 
branded on the forehead with a letter P. In addition one was to 
receive sixty and the other one hundred lashes. '' Nothing 
remarkable" occurred on Friday the twenty-fifth, excepting 
that the " small-pox came at the Landing aboard Capt. Gibbs." 
Daniel does not seem to have met with much success in the sale 
of his liquors, and meanwhile appears to have found difficulty in 



A Trading Voyage to Georgia. 601 

amusing himself. Dull days were the rule. There were excep- 
tions noted, however, as, for instance, on the first of February 
when he attended a raffle for forty-one pounds sterling, and on 
the following Sunday when he went for a walk of two miles in 
the woods. On the fourteenth he sold some deerskins to Mr, 
James for four pounds and eleven shillings. 

Our traveller remained several weeks longer at Newport 
Bridge, occupying himself in endeavoring to sell his liquor, and 
in buying hides and rice which he shipped on the sloops of 
Captains Rhodes and Man, bound for Savannah. Perhaps he 
thought to make his apple-jack more palatable for southern 
palates, and consequently sell better, for he records that on one 
day he " Bot 7 lbs. of Sugar and Colored 2 Hhds. of Brandy " j 
and on another occasion he '^ Drawed off Hhd. Brandy and 
Reduced it 1 Gallon to every 3^ Gallons." We should be sorry 
to suspect Daniel of doctoring his liquor, so will charitably believe 
that to save freight he brought his apple-jack South much above 
proof, and then reduced it to a marketable grade. On Sunday 
the twenty-fourth of February he '' paid a half Dollar for a horse 
to ride to meeting." I fear that this ancestor was not as faith- 
fid to his religious duties as had been his father and grandfather 
before him 5 this is the only mention made of church-going dur- 
ing his three months' absence. On Monday the fourth of March 
he put his trunk on Captain Man's sloop for Savannah, and the 
next morning, which was very rainy, he set off on foot for that 
city in company with a Mr. Sutton. They lodged that night at 
Mrs. McKnight's tavern, twenty-six mUes on the road, which 
they reached about sunset, very much fatigued. By sunrise the 
next morning they were again on their way, tramping over a 
fertile country abounding in extensive plantations devoted to the 
culture of rice, indigo and tobacco. Savannah was reached at 
ten o'clock ; they found it embowered in trees in full leaf, with 
peach trees in bloom, and the place alive with people because of 
*' Great horse Racing." 

Daniel procured board at the Widow Spencer's for five dollars 
a week, and at once turned his thoughts to business, but he com- 
plains the next day that little could be done owing to racing 
" Still Going forward." He soon sold his rice, which arrived by 
the sloops, and bought more, as well as a lot of hides and indigo. 



602 The Story of an Old Farm. 

His liquors continued to be a drug on the market, so finally, on 
the twenty-second of March what remained unsold he shipped 
back to New York, together with other merchandise, by the 
ship " Jenny," Captain Schermerhorn. He also took his own 
passage home by this vessel. On the afternoon of the twenty- 
fifth the " Jenny " hauled out in the stream, and the next day 
'^ Dropt Down the River to five fathom Hole." At seven 
o'clock on the morning of the twenty-seventh the ship was under 
way, and by two in the afternoon Tybee lighthouse was abeam 
and the " Jenny " was plowing northward before a free breeze. 
The voyage was much like others along the coast, before and 
since. There were days of sea-sickness, several whales were 
seen, and occasionally vessels were spoken, bound south. At 
three in the afternoon of the third of April the Highland 
Lights were in sight and the pilot came on board, and by even- 
ing the " Jenny" was lying at anchor within the HoFseshoe. At 
nine o'clock the next morning all sails were set, and with a fair 
wind the ship made good time across the bay and through the 
Narrows, reaching New York in the afternoon. 

Our next contribution from these manuscript treasures on the 
table contains but a few words, but it opens up the whole subject 
of slaveholding on the Old Farm : — 

Although the buying and selling of negroes had been common 
throughout the century in Soifierset county, Aaron Malick was 
an old man before he became a slaveholder. He had often 
desired to purchase a few hands to work in the tannery or on the 
farm, but had refrained in consideration of the wishes of his wife 
who had always strenuously opposed the introduction of bonds- 
people into her household. Charlotte was a descendant of a 
Quaker family, and had inherited that hatred of the institution 
which has always most honorably distinguished the peace-loving 
Society of Friends. But in the year 1786 A-aron's brother-in- 
law, Jacob Kline, offered to sell him his negro man Yombo, who 



Slavery on the Old Farm. 603 

was a mastei'-hand at tanning, currying and finishing leather. 
This offer came at a time when Aaron was sorely pressed for 
help, and the opportunity seemed too good to be passed by. 
After much urging on the part of the husband, the^wife finally 
stifled her scruples and acquiesced in the purchase. 

So Yombo was transferred from the Hunterdon tannery on the 
Rockaway river to the Bedminster tannery on the Peapack 
brook, where he soon proved himself a most valuable workman. 
He was a Guinea negro, having been brought from Africa when 
a boy, where, as he claimed, his father was a '' big man." 
Yombo was stout, coal black, club-footed and very bow-legged. 
At first his appearance quite terrified Daniel's little children ; he 
rarely wore a hat, always chewed tobacco, rings hung from his 
ears, and his language was a mixture of poor English and a jargon 
peculiar to himself. In addition, his disposition was not in any 
sense agreeable, and his perverseness always displayed itself 
when he was not under the immediate eye of his owner and 
master. But being an excellent workman his peculiarities Avere 
passed over, and for many years he was a conspicuous feature of 
life at the homestead. Yombo had a slave wife living at Eliza- 
bethtown. It was Aaron's custom to permit him occasionally to 
visit her, for that purpose putting money in his pocket and lend- 
ing him a horse and chair — as the two wheeled gigs of that day 
were called. Notwithstanding his master's goodness the darkey 
was treacherous, and, when all ready to start on the journey, 
Aaron was always particular to look under the seat of the chair, 
where he not infrequently found a wallet stuffed with finely- 
finished calf-skins, with which Yombo had hoped to improve his 
fortunes at Elizabethtown. 

The short note written to Aaron Malick by Oliver Barnett 
presages the advent of the second slave — or rather a whole fam- 
ily of slaves- -on the " Old Farm." General John Taylor was a 
well-known resident of Hunterdon county, who had been an 
active militia officer in the war, closing his service as colonel of 
a regiment of state troops He was only a paper brigadier, that 
is, had attained the rank and honor of general after the war. At 
the time this note was written he had become financially embar- 
rassed, and finding it necessary to sell some of his slaves had 
offered Dick and his family to Aaron. General Taylor's princi- 



604 The Story of an Old Farm. 

pal creditor was Doctor Oliver Barnett of New Germantown. 
Aaron, knowing this, was unwilling to entertain the idea of pur- 
chasing these chattels until the doctor's permission had been 
obtained ; hence the note we have under consideration. Oliver 
Barnett reached Hunterdon county, unheralded, in 1765, his 
entire worldly possessions being represented by a Maryland 
pony. In ten years' time he had developed an extensive prac- 
tice, and had saved enough money to buy the farm, mill and 
homestead of Tunis Melick ; the latter he enlarged and beauti- 
fied, giving it the name it still bears of Barnet Hall. Doctor 
Barnett was an excellent physician and soon grew rich ; during 
the war he was surgeon of the 4th Hunterdon battalion, and 
until his death was widely and highly esteemed. 

So now for the second time we behold Aaron and Charlotte 
facing the question of the wisdom of buying slaves. The matter 
was given much serious reflection and provoked warm and earn- 
est discussions in the living-room of the old house. We may 
imagine that Daniel urged the purchase. His parents were 
growing old ; their children were married, and all but himself 
had left home. His son, little Aaron, had grown to be twelve 
years old, his second child, Elizabeth, was ten, the third, Char- 
lotte, eight, and the youngest, Rozannah, but six. The care of 
these children and the old people, and the oversight of the house- 
hold generally, was largely on his wife's shoulders, and he doubt- 
less thought that so unusual an opportunity of procuring efficient 
help should be embraced. Every one said that Dick was a " most 
likely nigger ;" every one was right, for he was an exemplary, 
pious black of sterling parts, and his family but reflected the 
virtues of the sire. Charlotte was at last induced to give 
unwilling assent to the purchase, which was finally consummated 
in the spring of 1798. 

In fancy we see these colored people as they reach their new 
home, and stand a little abashed and nervous while receiving 
welcome from their new mistresses Dick is of a good dark 
color, heavy-set and dignified in appearance, courteous and quiet 
in demeanor, while Nance does the talking and laughing for the 
family through thick lips which partially cover a full set of 
white teeth. She is lighter in color than her husband, and very 
short — not to say fat. You know where her waist is because you 



Black Dick and Nance. 605 

see her apron strings, but with that feminine badge removed, to 
locate her zone would be like establishing the equator — a matter 
of calculation rather than visual certainty. Her breadth affords 
a good cover for her three frightened children, who peer shyly 
from behind her ample skirts at the new '* white folks," at the 
same time taking curious note of Daniel's flock who form a 
background to their mother and grandmother. Diana the oldest 
is seven and large for her age, Sam is four, Ben the youngest is 
a little pickaninny of two — all pretty black, and each one well 
ivoried. A few pleasant words, emphasized with cookies, soon 
calm their agitation, and it is not long before parents and 
youngsters are at their ease and taking kindly to their new sur- 
roundings. The children proved to be quiet and obedient and 
quickly found themselves possessed of a happy home ; they had 
playmates in Daniel's boys and girls, mutually kind feelings 
existed almost immediately, and white and black lived happily 
together. 

Nance was duly installed in the outer kitchen at the east end 
of the house, and Dick was made general farmer, he having been 
well recommended for that work. Both husband and wife were 
devout Christians and regular attendants at church, greatly to 
the satisfaction of Charlotte whose affections soon went out to 
these worthy bondspeople, causing her prejudice against slavery 
to wane daily. Nance became her devoted attendant, cook, and 
skilful housekeeper, while Dick met his master's expectations as 
a farmer and trusty servant. In a few years he had nearly the 
entire control of the farm, which he managed with great prudence 
and intelligence ; being always faithful to the interest of his mas- 
ter, he was rewarded with a leniency and trust that few white 
people in the same situation would have enjoyed. . In March, 
1800, a fourth child, Joe, was born. Two years later the cur- 
rent of home life was unhappily disturbed by the sudden death of 
Charlotte. It was the result of an accident which occurred in 
February, when she and her husband were returning from a visit 
to some friends living near Rockaway. Owing to the breaking of 
the harness, the chair, or gig, in which they were riding was 
overturned, and its occupants were thrown violently to the ground. 
Aaron escaped with a few bruises, but Charlotte was so injured 
that for five weeks she was on the " verge of Heaven." Then 



606 The Story of an Old Farm. 

came the thirteenth of March, an unhappy day for those who 
loved her. While sitting in a rocking chair at the window of the 
best room, looking out on the familiar meadows with their tree- 
fringed river, suddenly, for her the world grew dim, — death 
softly laid his hand upon her heart. 

"Night-dews fall not more gently to the ground 
Nor weary worn-out winds expire so soft." 

The grief of Nance at the loss of her mistress was as deep and 
sincere as that of any other member of the household, but to 
Daniel's wife as sole mistress she was equally faithful, and to 
Aaron in his old age and loneliness she gave the most devoted 
care. 

The slaves on the " Old Farm " had their indulgences and 
enjoyments. The Christmas season was one of great festivity, 
of some pomp, and not a little dignity. During the week between 
Christmas and New Year's day they generally gave a party when 
the older colored people of respectability were invited. In those 
days the slaves were known by the family names of their mas- 
ters, so on such occasions in the living-room and outer kitchen, 
which were given up to the entertainment, were to be seen 
the Gastons, Klines, Linns, Van Dorens, V^an der Veers, and 
such others from near and far as attended the same church and 
mingled in the same colored society. There was much style and 
a profuse use of large and heavy words, each person being 
addressed as Mr., Mrs. or Miss. At the supper, after a 
lengthy grace fervently uttered by the one supposed to be the 
most gifted, even staid Dick Melick, who took upon himself the 
service of the table, displayed airs quite foreign to his generally 
modest deportment. This supper was, of course, entirely under 
Nance's supervision, and in quality and quantity was creditable 
alike to her as cook and to her old master as showing the liberal- 
ity and kind feeling he extended to his slaves, '' No, Sah, SarvuntSy 
if you pleased Although whiskey, cider and metheglin were 
always furnished to the lowly guests, a too free indulgence would 
not have been countenanced by the hosts, nor was it ever known,, 
the whole party always conducting themselves most decorously and 
politely, endeavoring as far as possible to be " jes like white folks." 
The pleasures of the Christmas season were not confined to this 
one festivity ; but little work was expected of the blacks during 



Dick and Nance go to Generaf. Training. 607 

the entire holiday week, for, dressed in their best, their whole 
time was devoted to visiting and pleasure. 

Another great day for the Bedminster colored people, always 
celebrated by Dick and Nance, was " general training/' usually 
occurring in the middle of June. Then it was that Dick took the 
big wagon and put on its tow and linen wagon-cover, tying up 
the sides so that from within an unobstructed view could be had 
of the martial array. Nance and the children were placed on 
chairs in front, and behind was a barrel of root beer of Dick's 
own manufacture, and a corn-basket full of large round ginger 
cakes — they called them bolivars — baked by Nance the day before. 
In addition there was a plentiful suppy of new-motvn grass from 
the bleach patch in the garden, which was always mowed at that 
time ; this was to keep the beer cool and to give the horses a 
bite during the day. Dick, in his Sunday clothes and display- 
ing a most conspicuous nosegay, would then seat himself on the 
foreboard, seize the reins, and with the stalk of a long whip against 
his shoulder and the lash hanging behind, would set off with his 
happy family and join the procession of teams that from early 
morning had been slowly moving up the long hill in the direction 
of Pluckamin. On reaching the grounds the horses were taken 
out and tied to a fence, and the business and pleasures of the day 
commenced. As long as the barrel and basket held out, beer was 
to be had for two cents a glass and cakes for a penny a piece. 
Between customers the sable merchants had plenty of friendly 
visitors, the children, meanwhile, playing about the wagon, or 
sitting quietly in round-eyed wonder at ail the glories of the day. 
With the approach of night Dick "geared" his horses and 
drove slowly home, his spirits lightened by the pleasures he had 
experienced, and his pockets full- weighted with big copper pen- 
nies. He would now have pocket-money for all his needs for 
months to come, and some to drop in the black bag each Sunday 
morning at church when the deacon passed it in the gallery, 
which Dick always did with a most reverential bow. 

Our old papers furnish numerous proofs of the excellent care 
bestowed by Aaron and Daniel on their servants. I cannot 
refrain from inserting just here one or twt) bills that fitly illus- 
trate the time and subject upon which we are now dwelling : — 



608 The Story of an Old Farm. 

The Estate of Aaron Melick 

1806 Calvin McKidder Dr 
Deer 25 To work for Yombo 2 6 

1807 Feb. 27 " making two pantaloons for Negro boys 6 

" cutting Negro cloths 6 

9 

Received May 10th 1811 the above sum of Nine Shillings. 

Calvin McKidder. 

Not only were the bodies of the dusky toilers clothed, but 
their minds were not neglected, for here is a bill of Christopher 
Logan to the " Estate of Aaron Melick Dec'd," dated the twenty- 
third of March, ''To Schooling Negro boy Joe 61 days $1.39." 
The village schoolmaster of eighty years ago evidently was not 
an expensive institution, nor were such low charges for tuition 
confined to colored scholars. I find another bill of two years 
later for one of Daniel's children in which "William Hambly 
teacher," charges "$4.16 for 159 Days' Schooling." 

It will be seen that slavery on the " Old Farm " was not alto- 
gether an unmitigated evil. For a number of years much hap- 
piness in their mutual relations came to both bond and free ; 
their lives moved on with but little friction, excepting an occa- 
sional outbreak from Yombo, which was met by a few earnest 
words of reproof from Aaron, who even in extreme old age 
retained the spirit of mastery. But on the seventh of April, 
1809, the peaceful calm of home life was rudely arrested by the 
death of the head of the household, who succumbed to an attack 
of apoplexy in his eighty-fourth year. Then Dick and his fam- 
ily knew what trouble was. Not only did they honestly grieve at 
the loss of a good master, but they sorrowed because they knew 
they must be sold, and possibly separated. A fifth child, Ann, 
had been born since the manumission laws had gone into effect ; 
she, consequently, could be sold only for service until reaching 
twenty-five years of age, but the other slaves had no reason to 
expect anything but servitude for life. What to do with the 
negroes had been a serious question with Aaron, and a subject 
of much anxious thought on his part ; but the decision he had 
reached could not be known until his funeral was over and the 
will read. His death occurred on Monday, the funeral being 
held at half past ten on the following Thursday. The interven- 
ing days oflfered but little opportunity for sorrow, owing to the 



A Country Funeral. 609 

Ijusy activity of the household in brewing, baking, and in gen- 
erally preparing for the obsequies, as in that age the occasion 
was made one of feasting as well as of grieving. 

The morning of this all important day found the Old Stone 
House full of friends and neighbors, for Aaron had been widely 
known and greatly beloved. Daniel, aided by other relatives, 
received the people, at the same time listening to their words of 
greeting and sympathy. Pastor GrafiF came over from New 
Germantown to conduct the services, it being, it is believed, the 
last time he officiated on such an occasion. As the hour 
approached for the service the immediate friends and relatives 
gathered in the darkened best room. In one corner on a 
table were several decanters containing rum, apple-jack and 
madeira, while before the looking-glass, which was covered with 
a sheet, the plain, almost rude, coffin rested on two chairs. 
There were no caskets in those days, nor much if any of the 
multitudinous paraphernalia now attendant upon funerals. Farm- 
ers of the olden time, as a rule, supplied their own burial cases and 
accessories. It was not uncommon for them to put aside, years 
before the death of any of the household, suitable boards for 
making coffins. These primitive shells were, of course, roughly 
fashioned, the interior trimmings and decorations furnished by 
members of the family being of the plainest character. 

On this funeral morning all the other rooms and the hall were 
filled with neighbors who overflowed through the open doors on to 
the front and rear porches. In fancy we can see the aged and fee- 
ble rector, robed in his Lutheran vestments, standing at the foot 
of the stairs — before him a little mahogany table upon which 
rest the big family Bible and the pastor's well-thumbed prayer- 
book. At his side the tall clock ticks in solemn unison with the 
slow, measured and sad tones of the holy-man, w^ho speaks from 
the heart, for he is bidding a last adieu to dust that is dear to 
him. His voice grows husky as he dwells on the virtues of the 
departed, and points out to the sorrowing hearers how that the 
common walk of the good-man of the house had been beyond 
that of ordinary every-day life. He cannot refrain from speak- 
ing of his own bereavement as he remembers that during his 
thirty -four years of ministrations over Z ion's congregation he, 
who now lies before him shrouded for the tomb, had been not 
39 



610 The Story of an Old Farm. 

only a parishioner but a friend and counsellor as well. In fancy 
we see the simple country folk in their Sunday garb as they 
gather about the bier — we hear their low tones and the noise of 
their feet scraping along the sanded floor. Through the rear 
door comes the sympathetic murmur of the dam below the hill, 
borne on the soft April wind, which as it draws through the 
house carries with it to the outer air a faint mingled odor of 
cake, vaniish and spices. 

The burial was at Pluckamin, and it was a large funeral cor- 
tege that slowly toiled up the long hill. The hearse was an 
ordinary farm wagon as, indeed, were nearly all the vehicles 
that followed after, although a few one-horse chairs, with quite a 
number of neighbors in the saddle, offered a little variety to the 
funeral procession. After the interment, as was the fashion of 
the time, very many of the people returned to the house when 
much of the rest of the day was taken up with eating and drink- 
ing, a succession of dinners being spread in the living-room. 
The appetites all being satisfied, the relatives and immediate 
friends gathered in the best room to listen to the reading of the 
will. It was soon known as to the manner in which Aaron had 
partially solved the problem of what to do with his negroes. 
The will ordered that Nance's children should be sold under 
indenture to serve until the boys reached the age of twenty- 
eight and Diana twenty-five, when they were to be manumitted. 
This was evidently a compromise of the old gentleman's between 
his children and his slaves. Had he freed his negroes it would 
have meant pauperism for them, and an incubus for his estate, 
as they would have had to be supported. This plainly had 
seemed to him to be the best way out of the difficulty, and as no 
mention in the will was made regarding Dick and Nance there 
probably was an understanding between him and his children as 
to their disposal. 

The auction, or vendue, was to be held on the twenty-second 
of May. The intervening weeks proved a serious time to both 
whites and blacks, and the hours wore heavily on, though only 
too fast when the thought of separation and the loss of a happy 
home confronted the poor slaves. The fateful day at last arrived 
and with it came a large assemblage of people, as at that time an 
auction sale of this character was always made a festive occasion. 



Auction Sale of the Slaves. 611 

We can judge of the numbers present by the following extract 
from a bill of Levi Sutton, showing the amount of apple-jack that 
was consmned in their refreshment. " 1809 May 20th To 27 
Gallons cyder spirits for vendue and settling a'cts ^ 69 cents — 
$18.63." William Cummins, well known in those parts as an 
auctioneer, cried the sale, and Nicholas Arrosmith's son 
William acted as clerk, each charging two dollars a day for their 
services. The sale commenced at the barns, when, after the hay, 
grain and other property had been disposed of, the people were 
invited to the house to buy the " niggers." Dick's family were 
sold in the following order, as shown by the account sales pre- 
served : — 

One Negro girl till she is 25 years of age, Diana — to Jonathan Dayton 

Esqr. 1100 
One negro boy, Sam, till he is 28 years of age — to 

Revd. John McDowell 225 
One negro boy, Dick, till he is 28 yrs of age to 

William R. Smiley 225 

One negro boy, Joe, till he is 28, to Jacob Kline 120 
One Old Negro man, Dick, sold a slave to 

Daniel Melick, 40 
One Old Negro Wench, Nance, a slave, to 

Daniel Melick, 40 
One Negro girl named Ann, born under Manumission 

law — to Daniel Melick, 35 

The dark cloud had a silver lining : Sam and Diana both went 
to Elizabethtown to prominent men well known to them, and who 
had been old friends of their late master. They were to be well 
cared for and to have good homes. Mr. Smiley who purchased 
Dick was also intimately known to, and respected by, the house- 
hold. Joe was carried off to New Germantown by Jacob Kline, 
Daniel Melick's uncle, which was next to being at home ; but 
above all Dick, Nance, and the little Ann would stay in the 
stone house. The old home was still theirs. 

Then came mider the hammer poor old Yombo, bending under 
the weight of his seventy years. Here is the record of his sale. 
" One old Negro Man, Yombo, sold a slave to John Hastier 

$50." It is my impression that this purchaser was the 

owner of Yombo's wife; at any rate he was a tanner and currier 
doing business at Elizabethtown. The sale over, Yombo goes 
contentedly to his new home ; the old bark mill and currying 



612 



The Story of an Old Farm. 



shop, and the seat by the fireplace in the outer kitchen, know 
him no more. Nothing more was heard of him by the Bedmin- 
ster people, excepting that several years afterwards word came 
from Elizabethtown — "Old Yombo is dead." 




CHAPTER XL. 

What the Old Papers Have to Say About the Drinking Habits 
of Our Forefathers — The Last Century's Tidal Wave of 
Intemperance — National Reform — Farewell to the " Old 
Farm. " 

As we turn again to the manuscripts on the table — these silent 
witnesses of the past — did even a few of them receive at our 
hands the attention their mute appeals for a hearing claim, this 
work would be extended through many pages. As their num- 
ber, then, bars the possibility of our taking them up singly, we 
will choose for consideration in this final chapter a subject to 
which directly or indirectly very many of them bear some rela- 
tion — the drinking habits of our ancestors. 

While there is no doubt that the diffusive moral influence of 
Christianity is, and has been, paramount to that of all other 
religions, still a sad commentary on the beneficent results of the 
civilization of this nineteenth Christian century is the failure of 
its generations to understandingly grapple with and overcome 
the dread evil of intemperance. Though a' great conservator of 
morality it is only to a limited extent that Christianity has been 
able to check the moral pestilence and physical scourge of drani 
drinking. In nearly, if not all, American cities the vital politi- 
cal factor is the saloon; the one great question before the better 
element of the community is, how shall the elective power of the 
liquor interest be defeated 1 It may be admitted, however, that 
within seventy years there has been a marked decrease in the 
social use of intoxicants, and that at present the tendency is still 
for better things, but there must yet be a great improvement 
before we can hope in our drinking habits to even equal the vir- 
tue of the remote ages of the past. In our day, though it is a 



614 The Story of an Old Farm. 

maxim in legal practice that those who presume to commit 
crimes when drunk must submit to punishment when sober, 
the fact remains that grave offences are condoned by intoxica- 
tion. That a person should have been so under the influence of 
liquor as to have partially weakened his understanding is often 
considered — at least by juries — as in some degree extenuating 
crime. In this regard we must confess to comparing most unfa- 
vorably even with pagan times. When the Greeks still worship- 
ped, among other false deities, the vine-crowned Bacchus, a citi- 
zen was the worse, not the better, before the law and judgment 
when by self indulgence, he put himself in such a condition as to 
be unable to control his mental and moral faculties. Pittacus 
decreed that he who was guilty of crime when intoxicated should 
be doubly punished — once for the crime itself, and once for the 
drunkenness that prompted the guilty act. The Athenians pun- 
ished offences done in drunkenness with increased severity, and 
Solon the wise enacted a law making inebriety in magistrates 
capital. 

Intemperance in the use of liquor has been the gradual growth 
of many hundred years over-indulgence, but the cidmination of 
its baleful influence may be said to have been during the close 
of the last and the beginning of the present century. Six hun- 
dred years ago alcoholic drinks were confined to malt liquors, 
wines, ciders and metheglin. It is only within three centuries 
that brandy and whiskey have been recognized as beverages, 
before that time their use having been confined to medicinal pur- 
poses. The great impetus to intemperance came in about 1640 
with the introduction of West India rum, and in this country 
sixty years later intoxicants were powerfully reinforced by the 
beginning of the manufacture of Medford and other rums by 
puritan New England. The next period in the increase of the 
vice of drinking followed the French and Indian war, when the 
soldiers, who during the campaigns had been furnished with 
regular rations of spirits, acquired habits of drinking " strong 
water" which they introduced on their return home into their 
families and communities. Then came the Revolution, when the 
government considered it as necessary for the troops to be sup- 
plied with rum as with bread ; with it the tidal wave of intem- 
perance rose to a great flood, and for over forty years rolled its 



Introduction of Apple-jack in New Jersey. 615 

devastating wave almost unchecked, for it was not until 1825 
that any combined effort was made to arrest the inordinate love 
of liquor which was carrying with it the property, reputation, 
health and lives of tens of thousands of people. In the middle 
states during the last quarter of the eighteenth century many 
new devices arose for concocting stimulants. In New Jersey the 
most important of these innovations was the production of apple- 
jack from apple pulp, and the distilling of cider-brandy from 
cider. Peaches, too, were converted into a sweet, rich brandy, 
and the same strong liquor was made from cherries, plums, per- 
simmons and pears. The last, known as perry, was considered 
the most delicate and appetizing of the sti'onger drinks. But 
in Somerset and Morris counties apple-jack sprang at once into 
favor, and from then until now in that portion of the state in 
rural communities it has been the standard tipple. Morris soon 
became the banner county in the production of this seductive 
compound ; to one of its citizens, Richard Kimball, who lived on 
the south side of Mount Washington (Kimball Hill) in Pas- 
saic township, is given the honor of introducing '^ Jersey light- 
ning " in the neighborhood, he having in 1773 imported from 
England a twelve gallon copper still, and commenced its manu- 
facture. 

In examining the papers before us we find that very many of 
them verify the belief that with the people of the last century, 
from the cradle to the grave, plentiful drinking was the feature 
of every occasion. It was not uncommon for a father at the 
birth of a son to lay in two pipes of wine or two barrels of rum. 
As the boy grew toward manhood he frequently surveyed these 
two packages with both a lively and a melancholy interest, for 
one was to be broached at his marriage, the other at his funeral. 
At christenings if not the baby at least the event was always 
baptized in copious quantities of liquor. The chances of the 
child, both as to moi'al and physical health, were greatly ham- 
pered by the condition of society to which an advent into this 
world at that period introduced him. The seeds of intemperance 
were literally sown in the cradle, for while yet little toddlers 
the male children learned to love the spirit-soaked sugar reserved 
for them in the bottom of their parent's tumblers. At home and 
-abroad, in summer and in winter, in prosperity and in adversity, 



616 The Story of an Old Farm. 

in the house of mourning and in the house of feasting, a free cir- 
culation of runij apple-jack, or fiery madeira was invariably the 
rule. At public vendues '' a dram to the next bidder " was a 
frequent announcement of the auctioneer. At the stores where 
the farmers sold their produce a big, brown, stone pitcher full of 
water and a teapot of whiskey usually stood at the end of the 
counter, and all customers were invited to take a cup of tea» 
That New Jersey farmer who refused each hay or harvest hand 
a daily portion of one pint of rum was considered a mean man. 
Did neighbors assemble to aid in raising a barn, to shear sheep, 
or to draw and stack the minister's winter supply of wood, the 
bottle was deemed requisite to give strength to arm and will, and 
to restore flagging energies. An old gentleman of my acquaint- 
ance, of Connecticut ancestry, informs me that his grandfather 
always kept in the cellar a hogshead of New England rum. It 
was his custom on summer mornings to draw a pitcherful, and 
then go to the garden and obtain from a bed kept for the pur- 
pose a bunch of tansy, with which he would mix a bowl of punch. 
Then calling together his wife, children and servants each one 
was given a drink, whereupon they had family prayers. After 
this came breakfast, all feeling conscientiously satisfied with the 
day's beginnings, for the rum punch would warn off fevers, 
miasmas and fluxes, while the prayers ensured the family virtue 
for twenty-four hours to come. 

During the last century in all households of any substance a 
tankard of punch was brewed each morning and placed on the 
sideboard for the use of the family and chance visitors. In fact, 
almost everybody drank, and the majority of people in good 
society thought it no shame to become tipsy at table ; it was the 
manners of the world, not only of one country or of one state. 
Even a noble English lord of that time, an exponent of virtue, 
though opposed to " the habitual soaking of port wine, or whiskey 
punch," expressed himself in his autobiography favorably toward 
'' an occasional booze " as having " a tendency to excite the 
faculties, to warm the aff'ections, to improve the manners, and to 
form the character of youth." This scion of nobility probably 
thought, with Coleridge, that men were like musical glasses — to 
ring their best they must be wet. So it was, for the time being^ 
all knowledge seemed to be lost as to the boundary line between 



Drinking at Funerals. 617 

moderation and excess. Even when death entered the door, and 
friends and neighbors assembled to pay their final tribute of 
respect to the departed, copious libations were considered neces- 
sary, until it was not unknown for persons to reel in funeral pro- 
cessions or even to stagger on the brink of the grave. Haw- 
thorne, in describing the obsequies of a colonial governor, 
recounts that the minister's nose glowed like a ruddy coal of fire, 
and the aged bearers staggered as they endeavored to solemnly 
uphold the coffin, for all day " many a cask of ale and cider had 
been on tap, and many a draught of spiced rum and aqua-vitae 
quaffed." At the funeral of Joanna Nevius in 1735 the bill of 
expenses paid by her son Wilhelmus — published in the Bergen 
genealogy — shows that while the coffin cost fifteen shillings the 
outlay for wine, beer, rum, spices, sugar and pipes was nearly 
five pounds. When Philip Livingston, the father of New Jer- 
sey's first governor, died in 1749, funerals were held both at his 
Hudson river mansion, and at his city residence on Broad street 
in New York. At each place a pipe of spiced rum was con- 
sumed, and to the eight bearers were given gloves, mourning 
rings, scarfs, hankerchiefs and monkey spoons. These spoons 
had a shallow, circular bowl, with the figure of an ape carved on 
the end of the handle. Among the papers of the late William A. 
Whitehead is the following bill of expenses attendant on the 
burial of Eleanor Bryant of Perth Amboy in 1776 : — 

Cash paid for 7 prs. gloves 1. 6.3 

Nutmegs 5 

1 Gal wine 1. 4.0 

1 " rum 7.6 
4 prs. Gloves 12.0 

" 1 Load of Wood 9.6 

2 lbs loaf Sugar 4.0 
Sexton 7.6 
Coffin 1.15.0 



£ 6.6.2 



This universal habit of toping in the olden time must have 
sadly seduced the morals of the communities when we find that 
even the ministers were unable to withstand the alluring vice, 
and occasionally over indulged without forfeiting the respect of 
their people. In the Memorial Hall at Deerfield, Massachusetts, 
is an oblong flask with a round hole in the top just large enough 



618 The Story of an Old Farm. 

to admit the small end of a goblet. For a long time it was a 
matter of conjecture as to what original use this curious article 
had been put. After abandoning various theories it has been 
proved that the purpose of the flask was to keep the parson's 
glass of toddy warm on a winter Sunday morning. We have 
been told by Doctor Lyman Beecher that clergymen at consocia- 
tion meetings always had something to drink, and though not 
intoxicated there was among them on occasions a considerable 
amount of exhilaration. Doctor Leonard Woods has recorded that 
he could count at one time among his ministerial acquaintances 
forty pastors who were immoderate drinkers, and that he saw at 
one ordination two aged ministers literally drunk, and a third inde- 
cently excited. Of course there were instances of clergymen 
becoming habitual drinkers to an excess that necessitated their 
deposition from the ministry, but such cases were happily rare. 
The Reverend Samuel Melyen, one of the early pastors of the 
First Church of Elizabethtown, was obliged to sever his relations 
with the congregation owing to intemperance. The unfortunate 
example of a minister's lapse from virtue does not seem to have 
proved a warning to the officers of the church, for we are told 
that at the ordination and installation of Mr. Melyen's successor, 
Jonathan Dickinson, then barely twenty-one, *' great quantities 
of toddy was consumed." 

Drinking at the meetings of religious bodies continued pre- 
valent throughout the century. Doctor Hall, in his history of the 
Presbyterian church at Trenton, recites that the treasurer's book 
of that congregation for the year 1792 records a charge " for beer 
at Presbytery, -IS.lOd;" also "bought of Abraham Hunt for the 
use of the congregation when Presbytery sat at Maidenhead :" — 

s d £ s d 

8 gals Lisbon Wine @ 7 6 3 

5 " Spirits @ 9 2 5 

Well authenticated traditions are current that when the tem- 
perance question began to be agitated in New Jersey it was not 
uncommon for ministers who were conscious of their own failings 
to urge the people, saying, " Do as I tell you, not as I do !" At 
the time of the installation of Doctor Leonard Bacon over the 
First Congregational church of New Haven free drinks were 
furnished by the society at an adjacent bar to all who chose to 



The Drink Evil Overwhelms Society. 619 

order them. The spiritual shepherds were not only consumers 
but producers. Not content with furnishing themselves as 
examples to their flocks in this pernicious habit of drinking, at 
times they set up stills, and supplied their followers with the 
means of tarnishing their reputations and impairing their facul- 
ties. In a previous chapter we have learned that the Reverend 
Jacob G. Grreen, of Morris county, was equally learned in law, 
medicine and theology, and engaged largely in secular pursuits. 
Although so pious that he would not permit the members of his 
family on Sunday to converse on any but religious subjects, he 
did not hesitate to own and operate a distillery. In the year 
1790 the Reverend Nathan Strong, pastor of the First Congre- 
gational church of Hartford and the author of the familiar hymn, 
" Swell the Anthem, raise the song," engaged with a member of 
his congregation in the distilling business. The enterprise 
failed, and the financial straits brought upon the minister pre- 
vented his appearing in public life for some time excepting on 
Sundays, that being the only day on which he could not be legally 
arrested. This circumstance did not operate against his receiv- 
ing the degree of Doctor of Divinity from Princeton college in 
1801. 

The evil of intemperance continued to increase to an alarming 
extent until by the turn of the century it had assumed proportions 
in New Jersey that threatened to overwhelm and destroy the 
physical vigor and the moral character of all grades of society. 
Ralph Voorhees, in writing of Somerset county at this period, 
says that drunkenness was like the destroying angel that passed 
over the land of Egypt, — there was scarcely a house where it did 
not leave one dead. The bottle and the hand were constant com- 
panions, and the wonder is that so many of our forefathers 
were preserved from the grave of the destroyer, and not only 
lived to old age as useful members of society, but were even 
ornaments and pillars in church and state. Mr. Voorhees 
writes : — 

During that period, land became reduced by improper culture, when it was 
found most profitable to plant orchards, and convert their fruit into cider, and that 
into spirits. In one township along the Raritan there were at the conimence- 
ment of the present century eight or more distilleries in operation, and the price 
of cider-spirits became so reduced that it was sold from twenty-five to thirty 
cents pr. gall«n by the quantity. Almost every farmer had his cellar stocked with 



620 The Story ok an Old Farm. 

barrels and hogsheads of cider-spirits, of which the family partook as their 
inclinations and appetites dictated. 

It must not be supposed that during all this time there were 
not men, far-seeing in their generation, who had some conception 
of the terrible blight that was likely to fall on the morals and 
health of their fellows if some endeavor was not exerted to stem 
this torrent of human folly. Even before the middle of the last 
century sporadic efforts had been made to abate the evil. As 
early as 1744 John Wesley stigmatized rum-sqllers as " poison- 
generals," who " drive men to hell like sheep." General Putnam 
of Connecticut and John Adams of Massachusetts had both 
before the Revolution protested against diquor-sellers ; and 
everyone is familiar with Franklin's appeals to his fellow journey- 
men-printers that they should abstain from intoxicants. 

It is to our old friend whose acquintance we made at Prince- 
ton and Pluckamin in 1777, Doctor Benjamin Rush of Phila- 
delphia, that the honor must be given of being the pioneer in a 
movement that has been of more advantage to the human race 
than has any other of modern times. While connected with the 
army he had become impressed with the error made by the gov- 
ernment in so plentifully supplying the soldiers with rum. In 
1777 he published a pamphlet addressed to the army protesting 
that the frequent use of spirits by the men wore ^way rather 
than supported their bodily powers, and laid the foundation of 
fevers, fluxes, jaundice and other ills common in military hospit- 
als. But it was in 1785 that this father of temperance reform 
gave to the world what soon exerted a powerful influence in 
checking and controlling the high carnival of drunkenness, 
disease and death that had overspread the land. This was his 
celebrated essay, "The Effects of Ardent Spirits on the human 
Body and Mind," a treatise which was the germ from which 
grew the great temperance movement that has since extended 
over the entire globe. Though the seed fell into ground that was 
rank from the decaying weeds of many years of excess and indul- 
gence it did not at once develop ; but containing the potentiality 
of great results it eventually became quick with life, and forced 
its way above ground up into the sunlight of public endorsement, 
until it grew into a great tree bearing rich fruit. Doctor Rush, 
armed with this essay, commenced an individual crusade against 



Doctor Rush and Temperance Reform. 621 

the dominant evil of the time. Religious societies, general 
assemblies and other bodies were visited, stirring appeals were 
made in support of the tract, thousands of copies of which were 
distributed; leading men of the country were extensively corres- 
ponded with, Quaker yearly meetings and Methodist confer- 
ences were beseiged, and wherever went this earnest doctor his 
voice could be heard crying aloud, beseeching ministers of every 
denomination to aid him with all the weight and influence of their 
sacred offices in saving '^ fellow-men from being destroyed by 
the great destroyer of their lives and souls." This was the incep- 
tion of the temperance reformation. Its germ, the celebrated 
essay, had slumbered long, awaiting more genial influences; but 
eventually they were created by the magnetic personality of the 
tireless author, until, nurtured by the churches, an interest was 
kindled among the masses which raised the first barrier to the 
fearful tidal wave of drunkenness that threatened to overwhelm 
humanity. 

The fight of Doctor Rush was not against wine and beer — these 
he accepted as nourishing and healthful — but against distilled 
spirits. He declaimed against, not only the abuse, but the use 
altogether of "hard liquor," excepting in cases of sickness 
"when" he said "it is better applied to the outside than to the 
inside of the body." His continuous agitations resulted in 
enlisting the sympathies of many prominent men ; among them 
the Reverend Doctor Lyman Beecher, who after reading Rush's 
essay "blocked out" six powerful temperance sermons which, it 
is said, went echoing around the world in the English, French, 
German, Danish, Hottentot, and other languages. In 1808 
Saratoga county in New York gave America its first temper- 
ance society. Other like organizations were soon established in 
the same state, and in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and 
within a few years the movement had extended through all the 
middle and New England states. At this time the propriety and 
good policy of total abstinence had been conceived by but few 
minds. The fight was against distilled, not fermented liquor, 
and it was the moderate use of the former, rather than abstain- 
ing from it, that was advocated. It is on record that after the 
organization in a tavern of one of the earliest societies, the offi- 
cers, in return for the honors conferred upon them, treated the 



622 Thk Story of an Old Farm. 

members at the bar. The president, raising a glass of liquor 
to his lips, said to his associates — "Now, brethren, let us show 
to the world that we can drink in moderation." 

For a number of years the progress of reform was exceedingly 
slow. It had been instituted at a period when the morals of the 
American people were on the lowest plane known in their his- 
tory. The breaking up of the army at the close of the Revolu- 
tion had distributed throughout the country men whose appetites 
for liquors had been unnaturally developed by the great quantity 
of free rum furnished the troops by continental congress. The 
government, notwithstanding the protest of Doctor Rush, had 
acted under the fatal delusion that the soldiers, owing to their 
privations and hardships, needed a plentiful supply of stimulants 
in order to preserve their health and spirits. Throughout the 
war in the army rum, when it was to be had, was the feature of 
every occasion, and double quantities were always served to the 
men on high-days and holidays. Lieutenant Ebenezer Elmer, of 
the 3d New Jersey battalion, thus describes the reception of the 
news of the Declaration of Independence when the courier bear- 
ing it reached brigade headquarters, on the fifteenth of July, 
1776:— 

At twelve o'clock assembly was beat that the men might parade in order to 
receive a treat, and drink the state's health When, after having made a barrel 
of grog, the declaration was read, and the following toast was given by Parson 
Caldwell :—" Harmony, honor, and all prosperity to the free and independent 
United States of America ;" when three hearty cheers were given. 

A letter written by Major Barber to Mr. Caldwell, on the 
seventeenth of the same month, informs us how the news of inde- 
pendence was received by Colonel Dayton's New Jersey command 
— then at Fort Stanwix. After the Declaration had been read, 
cannons fired, and huzzas given, the battalion was formed in a 
circle with three barrels of grog in the centre. The Colonel 
took a cup and drank to the toast — ''God bless the United States 
of America." The other officers followed, drinking the same 
toast, as did afterward the battalion, accompanied by loud hur- 
rahs, shouting, and other signals of approbation. So it was to 
the end, — when on the announcement of the cessation of hostilities 
barrels were broached in every camp, — rum seemed to be con- 
sidered the one thing needful, either as a panacea for evil days, 
or as an aid in rejoicing over success. 



Farewell to the Old Farm. 623 

The period between the Revolution and the war of 1812 was 
a singularly unpropitious time in which to endeavor to inculcate 
in the public mind the idea of restrictive habits and controlled 
appetites. The people having gained their own political inde- 
pendence had also become imbued through the teachings of the 
French Revolution with the most reckless notions regarding 
their personal rights ; and they were but little inclined to brook 
any interference that tended to check their individual liberty in 
thought or conduct. It was not until the establishment in 
February, 1826, of the " American Society for the Promotion of 
Temperance" that any extraordinary or persistent advancement 
of the cause ensued. All that had gone before had been but 
introductory — the laying of the foundation upon which was to be 
reared the grand superstructure of national reform. Town and 
county auxiliaries to the parent societies were soon formed in 
almost all of the states, resulting in a temperance agitation which 
was widely distributed, and from which has since sprung the 
Washingtonian movement, the Father Matthew societies, the 
National League, church societies, law and order leagues, and 
the many cold water armies that for over half a century have so 
bravely fought the common foe of humanity. 



We have used the old farm as a cord, or chaplet, upon which 
to string our historical pearls. That cord, having been cut for 
the needs of a single century, is now fuU. It remains for us, 
therefore, but to tie the ends together and to modestly lay our 
votive gift at the feet of Clio — the fair muse of history. Of 
books in her honor there have been no end. Many, like lumi- 
naries in the literary heavens, have thrown floods of light over 
vast areas of the globe and have embraced long eras of time, but 
it is hoped that the work we are now concluding will also serve 
her cause. All cannot be suns, yet a modest torch or candle can 
throw light, and reveal what has before been hidden. Thus 
would we fain believe that this book will find a welcome, because 
of the little it contributes to our fund of knowledge of times and 
ways long bygone. Of course it falls far short of what was 
hoped for when planned, but the ideal is rarely realized in exe- 



624 The Story of an Old Farm. 

cution. Content must come with the consciousness that the pre- 
ceding pages embody an honest endeavor to faithfully and truth- 
fully preserve unrecorded facts and traditions, which, meteor-like, 
had they once fallen to the ground could never have been 
rekindled, but now, so far as this book may be considered a 
repository of information, they become fixed stars in the firma- 
ment of history. 

Some one has said that the two most engaging powers 
of a historical writer are to make new things familiar, and 
familiar things new. Thus as we have turned over the 
pages of the past, blurred, and often indistinct, though '' rich 
with the spoils of time," an efibrt has been made in retell- 
ing an oft-told'tale to increase the interest in the narrative by 
correcting some errors, by adding a little that is new, and by 
throwing the light of the most recent research on much that is 
old. Care has been taken, meanwhile, to follow the injunction 
of Johnson not to lie on the watch for novelty and great things, 
for such cannot have escaped former observation, but rather to 
follow the quiet undercurrents of life of both ordinary and extra- 
ordinary folk, and thus fill in many interstices left by greater 
historians. The writing of these pages has not been in vain if 
they influence their readers, especially their youthful readers, to 
turn their minds from the present, and carry their sympathies 
and interest back to the early days of their country's inception 
and growth, and fill them with a desire to become more and 
more familiar with its gradual advancement from primitive 
beginnings to its present state of high civilization, and impor- 
tance among the nations of the world. 

And now it is time to say farewell to the " Old Farm." We 
found it an unrecognized indefinite part of an indefinable wilder- 
ness. We have traced its emergence from such a condition into 
definite boundaries and an individual possession. We have 
followed the gradual growth of its surrounding country from 
barbarism to a state of progressive refinement and cultivation ; 
we have witnessed the introduction of religion and noted the 
increase of population ; we have seen our forefathers leading 
contented lives subjects of a king ; we have learned what a poor 
thing is a king when he tries his power against freemen. An 
old world's kinsman has crossed the seas and established himself 



So Generations in Their Course Decay. 



625 



on our ancestral plantation. With interest we have watched in 
him, in his children and descendants, the gradual transformation 
of German subjects into American citizens. Three successive 
generations of occupants have peopled the Old Stone House, 
and now we leave it with a fourth playing their simple parts 
therein. Soon, like their predecessors, they will make their 
exit, following that behest of nature, as inexorable in their day, 
and in ours, as it was in that remote age when time was meas- 
ured by olympiads instead of centuries, and when Homer 
wrote : — 

^' Like leaves on trees the race of man is found. 
Now green in youth now withering on the ground, 
Another race the following spring supplies. 
They fall successive, and successive rise ; 
So generations in their course decay, 
So flourish these when those have passed away." 



The End. 




40 



MOELICH-MALICK^MELICK-MELLICK 

GENEALOGY. 



" Those only deserve to he remembered who treasure up a history of their ancestors." 

— Burke. 

So far as can be learned the Moelich family originated in Germany. It still 
exists in that country, there being resident representatives in Frankfort on the 
Main, in Bendorf on the Rhine, and in Winningen on the Moselle. A tradi- 
tion has come floating down through the generations, which proclaims in a shad- 
owy sort of way that the first Moelich in Germany was a migrator from Greece 
and that the word — or one approaching it — in ancient Greek stands for lyric 
verse. It certainly appears in various forms in that language. It will be 
remembered that it was by the way of the shores of the deep Gulf of Malic that 
the Persians reached the Pass of Thermopolje; and the English word melic, 
defined in the Imperial dictionary "relating to song, lyric," is from the Greek 
root melikos, or melos, a song. The word is also to be found in other languages, 
and is said to be a not unusual family name in the East, especially in Armenia — 
an Armenian poet of distinction, Agob Melik Agobian, died in 1888 at Tiflis in 
Georgia, and was honored with a public funeral. There is a Mount Mellick in 
Ireland. A millet grass that grows on the coast of Lincolnshire, Britain, is 
called " melick," and one of England's sweetest singers has embalmed the word 
in the lines: "From the mead where the melick groweth." In Germany the 
family name is commonly written Molich, the diaresis over the o indicating that 
a second vowel has been dropped. In America, during the last one hundred and 
fifty years, various spellings and pronunciations of the name have been in 
vogue; the signatures of descendants of emigrant ancestors Moelich appearing as 
Molich, Malick, Malik, Meligh, Mehlig, Melik, Melick and Mellick. Distributed 
throughout the United States and Territories there are at present families 
known as Moelicli, Malick, Melick and Mellick. The latter name, in some 
instances, is pronounced as if the syllable division was made between tlie / and ?, 
the first syllable being accented. 

The plan of this genealogical record is to first give an outline of the German 
ancestry and then to follow descents down five ancestral streams, flowing from 
five different German emigrants Moelich, who all came from Bendorf on the 
Rhine, viz. : JOHANNES (A), who reached America in 1735, and settled on 
the "old farm" in Somerset Co., N. J.; GOTTFRIED{B), a brotlier of JOHAN- 
NES (A) who came with him to America, and on reaching maturity settled in 



628 WlNNINGEN AND BeNDORF. 

Sussex, now Warren, Co., N. J. ; JOHAN PETER (C), another brother, who 
reached America in 1728, and whose son Tunis settled in Hunterdon Co., N. J.; 
DAVID (D), believed to have been a cousin of JOHANNES (A), who also set- 
tled in Hunterdon Co. ; and PETER (E), a brother of the last, who settled in 
what is now Columbia Co., Pennsylvania. In addition will be given the record 
of all the descendantsof JOHAN JACOB KLEIN (Jacob Kline), and SIMON 
LUDEWIG HIMROTH (Simon Himrod), two German emigrants who married, 
respectivelv, Veronica Gerdrutta and Marie Cathrine, the only daugliters of 
JOHANNES (A). 

The following abbreviations will be used : — b. born — d. died — dec. dead — m. 
married — unm. unmarried — wid. widow — Presb. Presbyterian — Meth. Methodist 
— Epis. Episcopal — desc. descendant — Northumb. Northumberland — grad. grad- 
uated — bro. brother — Col. Columbia — app'd. appointed — ch.yd. churchyard — 
Lutli. Lutheran — Rev. Reverend — S. O. F. Story of an Old Farm. 



THE MOELICH FAMILY IN GERMANY. 

The first of the name is PETER, who appears in or about the year 1.500 on the reg- 
ister of the Lutheran congreg-ation at Winningen. This place is a market town of 
about three thousand inhabitants, on the left banli of the Moselle, five miles above 
Coblentz. It has a background of lofty and precipitous rocks, every available spot 
of which is planted with vines, producing the best flavored wine of the Lower 
Moselle. Winning-en is one of the most ancient settlements in Germany, the 
unearthing of numerous coins, bits of arms, and remains of masonry, proving con- 
clusively its Koraan origin. In the year 888 the place was called Windiga, the present 
name havinging first been used about 113C. In 1288 Winningen came into the posses- 
sion of the county Sponheim, which resulted, a few yeai-s later, in its forming, like 
Enkirch, Trarbach, and other places on the Moselle, a strong Protestant enclave in 
the midst of the Roman Catholic Electorate of Treves. Since 1814 it has been part of 
the kingdom of Prussia, and for sixty years before that date was attached to the 
Grand Dukedom of Baden, During the year 1557 the congregation— whose register 
has supplied the little information I have regarding the Moselle Moelichs,— went 
over in a body, under the leadership of Father George MuUer, to the reformed reli- 
gion and, to-day, there are only Lutherans in Winningen. The church, which is a 
very plain but noble-looking Romanesque structure, was built soon after the year 
1200. During the seventeenth century the side naves were raised, in order to intro- 
duce galleries, which of course much mars its original architectural outlines. 
Pastor Theveny, the present incumbent, exhibits with much pride a Rom'an baptis- 
mal font, and, if his visitors are willing to climb, he will also show the fine large 
bells hanging in the tower. On one of them is inscribed " in godes nameit laeden ivh, 
nrndii'iis hois ich, he)i.ricJi vom proim goia mich anno x vc wide .seren." (In the 
name of God I do ring; my name is Mathens, and was formed by Henry of Proim in 
the 1507). 

I. PETER MOELICH of Winningen had a son, II. TIIEISS (Matthias), b. 1530, d. 1507. 
Theiss had a son. III. MICHEL, who m. in 1598 Margarctta Knaus. They had a son, 
IV. FRIEDRICH, b. 17 Jan., 1611, d. 9 Jan.. 1G95, m. Lucia Rormer. Friedrich had a 
son V. JONAS, b. 1050, who m. and had b. to him in Winningen, fourch., viz:— VI. 
GEORG THIEMANN, b. 1078: VII. JUSTINIA MARIA, b. 1081; VIII. HANS PETER, 
1). 19 Sep., 1683, and IX. ANNA APOLLONIA. date of birth unknown. In the year 
1088, JONAS (V.), leaving his eldest sou GEORG THIEMANN and his daughter JUS- 
TINIA MARIA in Winningen, removed with his two remaining children to Bendorf. 
This town, of 4500 people is located on the right bank of the Rhine, four miles below 
Coblentz. Like Winningen it was founded by Roman settlers early in the Christian 
era, they establishing a fortress there, which was destroyed by Huns, A. D. 375. 
The next known settlement at this point was in the eighth century when the 
nucleus of a population was formed by the establishing of a mission station in the 
vicinity by an English missionary named Wilibrord. The baptismal font of brown 
stone now In the possession of the Evangelical Head-Church of that place is said to 



The Moselle and the Ehine Moelichs, 629 

have been the one used by this missionary In baptizing the converted Rhine 
heathens. About the tenth century, as recited in the old documents of the county 
Wied, the Prankish liing-s set up here three courts. This attracted many settlei's and 
the place soon after assumed the name of Bethin, or Bede, meaning cheap, said to 
refer to the low price at which land could then be acquired. Since then the name 
has gradually changed from Bethendorf and Bedendorf to Bendorf. (See pp. 23 
-24.) 

JONAS (V) established at Bendorf a tannery, and became a prominent citizen and 
an assessor of the court. His wife having died on the eleventh of May 1693, he mar- 
ried as a second wife Gertraut Lucas. In Bendorf by his first wife he had born to 
him 2 ch., X. JOHAN MICHAEL, b. 13 Feb., 1689, who remained in the place of his 
nativity and had there ch. and grand-ch. ; XT. MARIA CHRISTINA, b. 25 Sep., 1691. 
His second wife bore him three ch., viz:— XII. JOHANNES, b. 14 Feb., 1695, who 
remained in Bendorf and had there eleven ch. ; XIII. MARIA CATHRINE, b. 21 July, 
1699, d. in infancy, and XIV. ANNA CATHRINE, b. 17 Apl„ 1704, d. in infancy. The 
second wife of JONAS (V) having d. in 1718, he m. for the third time, 24 Sep., 1719, the 
widow, Elisabetta Pistoris. JONAS (V) d. at Bendorf in 1722, his last wife surviving 
him for 20 years, dying at the age of eighty in 1742, 

HANS PETER (VIII) the second son of JONAS (V) had born to him in Bendorf 
eleven ch., viz :— XV. JOHAN JONAS, b. 27 July, 1710, who emigrated to America, and 
d. unm. in Hunterdon Co., N. J., (See p. 79); XVL ANNA CHRISTINA, b. 9Nov., 1712; 
XVII. JOHAN DAVID (D), b. 12 Nov., 1715, who emigrated to America, and d. in 
Hunterdon Co., N. J. seep. 79; for his descendants see genealogy of Johan David 
(D); XVIII. ANNA SYBILLA, b. 10 June, 1718, d. in infancy; XIX. JOHAN PETER, 
(E) b. 29 Aug., 1719, who emigrated to America and d. ia what is now Columbia 
Co., Pa.; for descendants see genealogy of Johan Peter (E); XX. MARIA- 
ELISABETH, b. 20 Sep., 1721, d. in infancy; XXI. JOHANNES, b. 22 Sep., 1723, who 
did not d. in Bendorf and probably emigrated with his brothers, he may have been_ 
the unlinown John Melick whose name occasionally appears in the last century on 
the register of Zion Lutheran Church at New Germantown, N. J., XXII. CATH- 
ERINE MARGARETTA, b. 23 Nov., 1725; XXIIL MARGARETTA GERDRUTTA, b. 
10 Nov., 1727; XXIV. CATHERINA, b. 10 Feb., 1730; XXV. MARIA CATHRINE, b. 13 
Dec, 17.32. 

When JONAS (V), migrated from Winningen to Bendorf In 1688 he was accom- 
panied by, XXVL JOHAN WILHELM MOELICH, the father of XXVII. JOHANNES, 
who founded the "Old Farm," whose story is told in this volume. There is every 
reason to believe that if not the son he was at least a nephew of JONAS (V). Four 
of Johan Wilhelm's children were named after the children of JONAS (V), and, as 
will be shown, in the baptism of his nine ch. in almost every instance the godfathers 
and godmothers were the daughters of Jonas and one instance Jonas himself stood 
sponsor. Investigations are being continued which, it is hoped, will establish the 
relationship between these two, and thus provide a common Gorman ancestor for 
all of the name in America. Johan Wilhelm's wife was Anna Cathrine, her parent- 
age not being known. She had a sister living in Winningen, the wife of Johan David 
Krober, he standing godfather in 1712 lor her son JOHAN DAVID (XVII). Another 
sister was the wife of a Mr. Hermann of Hochstenbach, who stood godfather in 1708 
to her son JOHAN PETER (XIX). Anna Cathrine Moelich died in 1729 as is shown 
by the following record on the register of the Evangelical Head-Church at Ben- 
dorf, in the handwriting of Pastor Joh. Georg Schmidt:— " Certiflcate of Death; 
1729, the 22d of July, Anna Cathrine Mcilich, wife of Hanss Wilhelm Molich, has been 
buried. God grant her the eternal life. Amen." (Hans., Joh., Johan., Johannes 
all stand for the same name, John.) 

Johan Wilhelm Moelich (XXVI) had 12 children. 

XXVII. JOHANNES (A), b. 26 Feb., 1702, emigrated to America in 17a5, he being 
the founder of the "Old Farm." For his record and that of his pos- 
terity see p fi.31. 

XXVin. JOHAN PETER (C), b. in 1708, emigrated to America in 1728, his chil- 
dren settling in JIunterdon Co., N. J.; for his record and that of 
his posterity see genealogy of Johan Peter (C). 

XXIX. MARIA CHRISTINA, b. in 1710, bap. in the Bendorf church by Rov'd 
Johannes Reusch, the certificate reading:— "The 26th of October 1710 
to Hans Wilhelm Molich has been baptized a young daughter and ha.' 
been named by the Christian name, Maria Christiim. The godmothers 



030 JOHAN WiLHELM MoELICH's CHILDREN. 

have been Jonas Molich's daughter Maria Christina, and Hans Peter 
Molich's wife. The godfather was the barber Mr. Reichard. God grant 
all prosperity to the child. Amen." 

XXX. JOHAN DAVID, b. July, 1712, bap. in the Bendorf church by the Rev'd 

Johannes Reusch, the certificate reading:— "The 34th of July, 1712, to 
Hans Wilhelm Mollch a young son has been baptized and has been 
named by the Christian name Johannes David. The godfathers were 
Johannes David Wortman, citizen of this place, and Johannes Molich, 
Jonas Molich's son. The godmother was Jonas Molich's daughter, 
Justina Maria, living at Winningen. God grant to the baptized all 
prosperity, liere and there. Amen." This Johan David d. in Bendorf 
15 July, 1756. 

XXXI. ANNA GERTRAUT, b. Jan., 1714, bap. in the Bendorf church by the Rev'd 

Johannes Reusch, the certificate reading:—" The 21st January, 1714, 
to Joh. Wilhelm Molich a young daughter has been baptized and 
named by the Christian name, Anna Gertraut. The godmother was 
Anna Gertraut, Johann Michael Molich's wife ; the godfather was 
Philipp Wilhelm Fassbender. God grant all blessings to the baptized. 
Amen." Godfather Fassbender was a brother of the Jacob Fassbender 
who in the year 1750 was a cotrustee with Johannes Molich (A) in Zion 
Lutheran Church in New Germantown, N. J. He was also the uncle 
of Gottfried Klein (Godfrey Kline) the emigrant ancestor of a well 
known Hunterdon family. (See p. 91.) 

XXXII. MARIA CATHRINA CHRISTINA, b. Feb., 1716, bap. In the Bendorf 

church by the Rev'd Johannes Reusch, the certificate reading:— 
"The 2.3d of February, 1716, to Joh. Wilhelm Molich a young daughter 
has been baptized and named by the Christian name Maria Cathrina 
Christina. The witnesses of baptism were Mrs. Dr. Senheim, of Cob- 
lentz, but whose place in proxy toolf her daughter, Mrs. Councillor of 
the Court, Pohl. The other godmotlier was my beloved wife. The 
godfather was Jonas Molich, citizen and assessor of the Court of this 
place. God grant all blessings to the baptized. Amen." "Mybeloved 
wife " was, of course, Mrs. Reuscli. This was the last occasion of her 
husband's officiating at Molich baptisms as he d. 22 Dec. of that year, 
having served the Bendorf Head-Church congregation since 3 Aug., 
1697. His successor was Pastor Joh Georg Schmidt (See p. 70.) 

XXXIII. ANNA SIBYLLA, b. May, 1718, bap. in the Bendorf church by the Rev'd 

Joh Georg Schmidt, the certificate reading:— "The 26 of May, 1718, to 
Joh. Wilhelm Molich a daughter has been baptized. Her witnesses of 
baptism have been Mr. Ehrenreich Kirberger, Sibylla Elisabeth, wife 
of Johan Wimmer, and Maria Cathrina, wife of Joh. Peter Fassben- 
der, citizen of this place. To her has been given the name of Anna 
Sibylla. God grant her grace for Jesus sake. Amen." This child was 
evidently named after Anna Sibylla (XVIII) second dau. of Hans 
Peter Moelich (VIII). Godfather Kirberger was a cousin of the wife of 
Johannes Moelicli (A). 

XXXfV. ELISABETH GKRDRUTTA, b. Aug., 1720, bap. in the Bendorf chuich by 
Rev'd. Joh Georg Schmidt, the certificate reading:— "The 28ih of 
August, 1720, to Hans Wilhelm Molich a daughter has been baptized. 
Witnesses of baptism were Master Hans Peter Hoffbaucr, citizen and 
resident of this place; further, Maria Elisabeth, Johann Molich's, wife; 
Veronica Gerdrutta, Georg Peter Otto's wife. To the child has been 
given the name Elisabeth Gerdrutta. God bless the child for Jesus 
Christ's sake. Amen." Godmother Maria Elizabeth Molich was the 
wife of Johannes (XII), the son of Jonas (V). Mrs. Otto was a sister 
of the wife of Johannes (A). 

XXXV. JOHAN GOTTFRIED, (B) b. 14 July, 1724, emigrated to America in 1735, 
with his eldest brother Johannes (A) and settled in Sussex, now War- 
ren, Co., N. J. For his record and that of his posterity see genealogy 
Of Johan Gottfried (B). 

Johan Wilhelm and Anna Cathrine Moelich also had born to them 
three ch. between the years 1702 and 1708. who all d. soon after birth. 
There is no record of the death of Johan Wilhelm in Bendorf, and he 
evidently removed from there after the death of his wife in 1729, and 



Johannes Moelich of Bedminster. 631 

is said to have emigrated. No record has been discovered of him in 
America; had he been there his youngest son Gottfried (B) would 
hardly have remained until his maturity as the ward of his eldest 
brother Johannes (A). (See p. 74). There is a tradition extant, 
the foundation of which has not been discovered, that he started for 
America with his sons Johannes and Gottfried, and d. on the way, 
either In Holland or during the voyage. 



THE GERMAN EMIGRANTS MOELICH AND THEIR POSTERITY IN AMERICA. 

JOHANNES MOELICH (A). 

(John Melick, of Bedminster, and his descendants.) 

I. JOHANNES MOELICH, was the son of Johan Wilhelm (XXVI) and Anna 
Catharine of Bendorf on the Rhine, Germany, where he was boi'n In 
1702, and baptised in the Evangelical Head-Church by the Rev'd. 
Johannes Reusch, the baptismal certificate reading:— " The 26th of 
February, 1702, a young son is born to the world to Master Hanss 
(Johan) Wilhelm Molich, and baptised by me on the 29th, and named 
by the christian name, Johannes, the godfathers were Master Johan- 
nes Reichard, citizen and shoemaker in the city of Fi-anckf urth, but he 
was represented In proxy by his brother Monsieur Reichard, theologi- 
cal student. The other godfather was Johannes Bohm, citizen at Win- 
iiingen. The godmother was Anna ApoUonla Molich, daughter of 
Master Jonas Molich. God grant all satisfaction of the body and of 
the soul to the baptised, tor Christ's sake. Amen." Johannes (I), d. 
16 Nov., 1763, at Bedminster, Somerset Co., N. J., and is buried in the 
Lutheran church-yard at Pluckamin. He m. 1 Nov., 1723, at Bendorf, 
Maria Cathrina, dau. of Burgomaster Gottfried Kirberger, of that 
place, b. in 1698, and bap. in the Evangelical Head-Church, by the Rev'd. 
Johannes Reusch, the baptismal certificate reading: "The 8th of 
January 1698 to the actual burgerraeister, Gottfried Kirberger, a 
young daughter has been born for the world and baptized the neirt 
Sunday. The godfather was Master Eberhard Reichard, the god- 
mother was maid Maria Cathrina Hahnin, daughter of Wilhelm Hahn. 
In the act of baptism to the child has been given the name Maria 
Cathrina. God give to the baptized all spiritual and material pros- 
perity." (See p. 71.) Johannes (1) emigrated with his wife, his 
four ch. born in Bendorf. and his youngest brother Johan Gottfried 
<B), to America, arriving at Phila. 39 May, 17.35, by the ship " Mercury," 
Captn. William Wilson. Tradition speaks of his having remained in 
Pennsylvania about ten years. He first appears in New Jersey In 
December, 1747, as the purchaser fi'om John F. Garrits of 409 acres in 
Greenwich township in Sussex, now Warren, county, fronting on the 
Delaware river and Pohohatcong creek. In 1750 he was living In 
Readington township, Hunterdon comity, his homestead being 400 
acres lying adjacent to the present line of C. R. R. of N. J., midway 
between North Branch and White House stations. Here he estab- 
lished one of the first tanneries in the province. The business and 
property was subsequently transferred to his partner and son-in-law, 
Jacob Kline. Until his death he was an olliccr and active in the atfairs 
or Zion Lutheran church at New Germantown, in that county. In 
November, 1751, he purchased of George Leslie .367 acres in Bedminster 
Tp., Somerset co., on the road as now running from Pluckamin to 
Peapack. On this land he erected a substantial stone house, to which 
he removed, and which is still in possession of his descendants, being 
now occupied by William P. Sutphon. On this property he also estab- 
lished an extensive tannery and a bark mill, which continued in suc- 
cessful operation for over one hundred years. For a complete 
account of Johannes Moelich and his children see preceding chapters, 
8. O. F. 



632 Chit.dren of Johannes Moelich. 

second generation (a). 

Johannes Moelich (I) had ch. 

2. I. GEORG WILHELM. His baptismal certificate entered by Pastor Job. 
Georg Schmidt on the register of the Evangelical Head-Church at Ben- 
dorf reads as follows: "1724, the twelfth of August, to Johannes 
Molich a son was born; because of his great debility he was baptized 
at once; but the child recovering fairly afterwards he had been 
solemnly blessed in the church the next Sunday. His witnesses have 
been Johan Wilhelm Molich the child's grandfather. Master Georg 
Peter Otto, and finally Master Joh. Wilh. Kirberger's wife, and has 
been given to the child the name Georg Wilhelm." Georg Peter Otto 
was the husband of Johannes' (1) wife's sister, and Joh. Wilh. Kirber- 
ger is believed to have been a bi-other of Johannes' father-in-law, the 
Burgomaster. The child d. the 20th of the same month. 

3. II. AARON, b. at Beudorf in Rhenish Prussia, 17 Oct., 1725, and was bap. 

Ehrenreich, on the following Sunday, in the Evangelical Head-Church 
by Pastor Joh. Georg Schmidt. The sponsors were Ehrenreich Kir- 
berger, — believed to have been his mother's cousin — and Johan Wim- 
mer, both of Bendorf. Aaron d. at Bedminster, N. J., 7 Apl., 1809 
and is buried in the churchyard at Pluckamin, m. Charlotte Miller, b. 
14 May, 1734, d. 13 Mch., 1802, from injuries received by being thrown 
from a carriage. Aaron inherited from his father the tannery, the 
stone house and two hundred acres of land upon which he lived until 
his death. He was an active member of Zion Lutheran Church at 
New Germantown in Hunterdon Co., and of St. Paul's at Pluckamin. 
During the Revolution he was an active patriot and at its outset was 
a member of the Bedminster Com. of Observation and Inspection. 
He filled many minor offices, was frequently called upon to serve as 
executor and administrator in the settlement of estates, and during 
a long and honorable career was always recognized as a leader among 
the substantial and prominent citizens of the county. He anglicised 
his name iTito Malick. See S. O. F. for a full account of his life. (For 
his 5 ch. see p. 633.) 

4. III. VERONICA GERDRUTTA, b. at Bendorf, Germany. 19 Dec, 1727, and was 

baptized a few days later in the Evangelical Head-Church by Pastor 
Joh. Georg Schmidt. Her certificate of baptism reads:— "The 21st of 
November 1727 to Johann Molich, junior, a daughter has been bap- 
tized ; her witnesses of baptism were Veronica Gei'drutta, Georg 
Peter Otto's wife [her mother's sister] ; the wife of the Burgomaster 
of Hochstenbach [her mother's brother]; Master Joh. Wilh. (V)„ citizen 
and tanner of Sayn, and has been given to the child the name Vero- 
nica Goi'drutta; God grant her his grace for Chi-ist's sake. Amen." 
In America Veronica Gerdrutta was familiarly known as Fanny; she 
d., 9 Oct., 1801, while visiting a dau. at Germantown, Pcnna., where 
she is buried; m. about 1749, Johan Jacob Klein (Jacob Kline), (for her 
husband and descendants see genealogy of Johan Jacob Klein.) 

5. IV. ANDREW, b. at Bendorf, Germany, in Dec., 1729, and was baptized, 

Andreas, in the Evangelical Head-Church by Pastor Joh. Georg 
Schmidt. His certificate of baptism reads:— "The 17th December 1729 
to Master Joh. Molich jun. of this place a son has been baptized. His 
witnesses were Proeceptor Kippold's wife Maria Cathrina; further 
Maria Christine, Joh. Hermann HoUinghaussen's, (also) tanners of 
this place, wife, and Master Andreas Kirberger [his mother's half-bro- 
ther] of this place, and has been given to the child the name Andreas. 
God grant to the same his grace, Amen." Andrew (5) d. 29 June, 1820, 
after living over 90 years; he is buried within the shadows of St. 
James' liUtheran chui-ch, near Phillipsburg, N. J., which congrega- 
tion he was in.strumental in founding. (See p. 305.) Hem. Catherine 
b. 1741, d. 27 Oct., 1804; she is buried by the side of her husband. On 
reaching manhood Andrew settled in Greenwich tp, Sussex, now 
Warren, Co., on land he Inherited from his father Johannes, being a 
portion of the 409 acres that he— Johannes— purchased from John F. 
Garrets, fronting on Pohohatacong Creek and the Delaware. (See 



Children of Johannes Moelich. 633 

p. 74-) On this property Andrew erected a Substantial dwelling- 
wherein he lived until 1810 when liy deed dated May 5, in considera- 
tion of fourteen thousand dollars he conveyed his homestead farm, 
"containing 283 acres and 8 perches, strict measure," to Abraham 
Carpenter of Greenwich tp. On July 4, 177G, he was commissioned 
captain in the 1st Sussex regt. (commanded by Col. afterwards Gen. 
William Maxwell,) and served during the war. His camp chest and 
military trappings were preserved by his descendants until 1849 when 
they were lost while his granddaug'hter, Mrs. John Derr, was moving 
from Bucks to Northumberland Co., in Pa. He anglicised his surname 
Malick sometimes signing it Malik. (For his 5 ch. see p. 6.36.) 

6. V. GEORGANTHON. His baptismal certificate entered by Pastor Joh. Georg 

Schmidt on the register of the Evangelical Head-Church at Bendorf, 
reads as follows:— "The 6th of April, I83;i, Joh. Molich's— a citizen and 
tanner of this place— son in the Easter Service has been blessed, hav- 
ing received previously on account of great debility the baptism of 
necessity in the house. With the blessing to him has been given the 
name Georg Anthon; his witnesses were Master Georg Thillman 
Molich a citizen and law assessor in Winningen; further, Anthon 
Kirberger, citizen and court-a.ssessor of this place, Bendorff; and fin- 
ally Master Philipp AVilhelm Fassbender's, a citizen's wife. God grant 
to the child His Grace and blessing for Christ's sake. Amen." This 
certificate is interesting, first, as showing that Johannes (1) was a tan- 
ner in the old country as well as in N. J., and second, because in hav- 
ing George Thillman Moelich (VI) as godfather it is additional evi- 
dence of an existing relationship between the father of Johannes (1) 
and of Jonas (V) with whom he came to Bendorf from Winningen. 
Godmother Fassbender was the wife of another brother of Jacob 
Fassbender, a co-trustee with Johannes (1) in Zion Lutheran Church 
at New Germantown. The child George Anthon (6) died 25 June same 
year. 

7. VI. MARIE CATHRINE (Maria), b. at Bendorf, Germany, 5 Dec, 1733, bap. at 

the Evangelical Head-Church by Pastor Joh. Geoi-g Schmidt, the cer- 
tificate of baptism being as follows:—" The 8th December 1733 to Joh. 
Molich a daughter was baptized, the witnesses being Christian Klein, 
citizen of this place, of reformed confession; further Marie Cathrine 
Hoffbauer, wife of Peter Hoffbauer, law-assessor of this place; and 
finally Anna Marie Cathrine Marxin wife of Andreas Marx of this 
place, and has been given to her the name Marie Cathrine. God bless 
the baptized for Christ's sake. Amen." Godfather Christian Klein 
was the father of Gottfried Klein who emigrated to America and 
settled in Hunterdon Co., N. J., and who was the immigrant ancestor 
of the well-known county family of that name. Marie Cathrine m. 
Simon Ludewig Himroth (Simon Himrod) who emigrated from Ger- 
many to America in 1752. For his full record and Marie Cathrine's 
descendants see genealogy of Simon Ludewig Himroth. 

8. VII. PHILIP, b. in Penna., 9 Oct., 1736, settled In the vicinity of Pluckamin, 

Somerset Co., N. J. (For his 8 ch. see p. 636.) 

9. VIII. PETER, b. in Pa., .5 Dec., 1739, m. Mary Magdalena King. Afterthe mar- 

riage he settled on 100 acres that he inherited from his father, being 
the southern portion of the Bedminstcr tract, Johannes purchased 
from George Leslie in 1751. Peter built a house and farm buildings on 
the present site of the village of Bedminster. Here he was living dur- 
ing the Revolutionary war, and here at least 3 of his ch. were born. 
He subsequently sold his farm to his brother Aaron and removed to 
Perth Amboy in Middlesex Co., and later, to Washington Valley, in 
Somerset Co. He anglicised his surname into Melick. See pp. 304, 328, 
335. (For his 8 ch. see p. 637.) 

THIRD GENERATION (A). 

Aaron Malick (3) had children : — 

10. I. JOHN. b. at Bedminster, .31 July, 17.58. d. in Schoharie Co.. N. Y., 7 Oct., 

1834, m. 15 April, 178.3, Jane Coriell, b. 13 March, 1765 d. 7 June 1814. She 



634 Children of Aaron Malick and Peter Ferine. 

and her husband are buried at Argusville in the above Co. John 
served in the army throughout the Revolutionary war. When 18 years 
old he enlisted in Capt. Jacob Ten Eyck's company, in the 1st Somerset 
battalion. He fought at the battle of Long Island, in a provisional 
regiment, commanded by Col. Philip Johnston ; was captured and 
imprisoned in one of the New York sugar houses. Tradition says that 
he was taken from prison by a British general whom he was forced to 
serve as a page. When finally exchanged, he re-enlisted in the con- 
tinental line. Abont 1807, he removed with his family to Sharon, N. 
Y., taking with him from the Bedrainster stone house, his father's 
long clock and the family Bible. He spelled his name Malick, as do all 
his descendants. See pp. 313, 316, 56,5, 579; (for 9 ch. see p. 638.) 
11 II. CATHARINE b. at Bedminster, 15 July, 1761, d. 10 Aug. 1793. m. 3 April, 1782, 
Peter Perine, b. 15 July, 1753, in Bedminster tp., Somerset Co., N. J., d. 
16 Nov. 18)28, at Salem, N. Y., where he and his first wife are buried, m. 
2d., Mary Mix of Middletown, Conn. He was the 3d son and 5th child of 
Peter and Mary Perine and the great-great-grandson of Daniel Per- 
rin, b. in France, and emigrated from the Island of Jersey in 1665, land- 
ing at Elizabethtowu from the ship "Philip" with Gov. Philip Car- 
teret. He was a French count and boasted of arms and a crest, m. 
Mariah Thorel, 18th Feb. 1666, who came over on the same ship. Peter 
Perine and Catharine Melick settled at Salem, N. Y., and had 7 ch. 
I. Charlotte, in. John Van Duyu; their ch. Harriet, m. Henry Arren- 
feldt; Catherine, m. Edward Blackford; Mary, unm.; a desc. is Mrs, 
Edward Blackford, 20 S. Union St., Rochester, N. Y. 
II. Aaron M., b. 6 Mch., 1787, at Bedminster, N. J., d. in the west, m. Cath- 
erine, dau. of Hon. John W. McLean, b. at Jackson, Wash. Co., N. 
Y., 29 Sep., 1788, d. at same place, 18 Dec, 1825; their one ch., Jane 
M., res. Argyle, N. Y., b. 10 Oct., 1815, m. James Savage, M. D., b. 
1798, d. 1879. 

III. Henry, b. 16 Feb., 1786, d. 12 Aug., 1869, m. first, Delana Cartie, b. 17 

Jan., 1794, dec, their 2 ch., Eliza C, res. East Salem. N. Y., b. 10 
Mch., 1816, wid. of Lewis T. McLean, had 4 ch. all m. : 
Thuinas K., res. Lysander Onon. Co., N. Y., b. 6 May, 1818. m. Mary 
Brown, has 4 ch., all m. 

Henry Perine— (III), m. second, Amanda, dau. of Fred Kellogg, 
of Cayuga Co., N. Y., b. 24 Aug., 1794, d. 4 Dec. 1877 : their 13 
ch.; Aaron M., res. Detroit, Mich., b. 26 Sep., 1821, m. 24 Sep., 1850, 
Mary Harvey, who d. 8 Oct., 1886; has 2 ch. living, Delana C, b. 1823, 
d. 1827. Julia A., res. Jordan, Onon Co., N. Y., b. 29 Mch., 1824, m. 
Jared Tyler, no ch. Letcis li., b. 1825. d. 1888, wife, dec. no ch. 
Mary 0., res. Ira, Cayuga Co., N. Y., b. 28 Mch., 1827. unm. Peter L., 
res. Omaha, Neb., b. 24 Feb., 1829, m. Gertrude Parker; 1 adopted 
dau. Reuben, res. Ira, N. Y., b. 1830, m. Caroline Benedict, has 5 ch. 
Sarah M., res. Meridian, Cayuga Co.. N. Y.. b. 1831, m. R. Daball, 
no ch. Francis H., res. Los Angeles, Cal., b. 1833, m. Mary Lock- 
wood, has 3 ch. William M., b. 18.34, d. 1878, unm. Caroline A.,h. 
1836, d. 1883, m. John Pardee, of Lysander, N. Y., has 1 ch. Clias. W., 
res. Kansas, b. 18:J8, m. a Miss Ells. DeWltt, res. Fulton. N. Y., b. 1840. 
m. Jane Smith, has 2 ch. 

IV. John, b. 1788, d. 1848, m. Hannah Billings, their7ch., Melancthon; Moses 

B.; Jos. S.; Mary; Kate; Xicholas; William; a desc. Is M. B. Per- 
ine, Doon, Canada. 
V. Mary. b. 14 Feb., 1789, d. 10 Mch.. 1882. ra. 11 Mch., 1812, Thos. K. McLean, 
b. 1784, d. 1872. Their 7 ch., Aaron, b. 31 Dec, 1812; De Witt, b. 13 Nov. 
1814; J/f/rj/ vlri?ic, res. Greenwich, N. Y., b. 17 May, 1819, ra. Revd. 
Chas. Pitcher; Henry A'., b. 8 June. 1824; Elizabeth, b. 1827, d. 1870; 
Leroy, res. N. Y. city. b. 14 Feb., 18.30; Reva. John K., res. Oakland, 
Cal., b. March, 18.34. 
VI. Martha, b. 9 Jan., 1791, d. 16 July, 1873, m. 20 Jan. 1816, Joseph South- 
worth, b. 1791, d. 1863; their ch., James C, b. 1819,, d. 1824; Anna 
Mary, b. 1828, d. 1868; Cornelia F.. res. Hurley, N. Y., b. 12 Aug., 1829. 
m. Revd. Sam. T. Searlc. 
VII. Catherine, m. Elisha Biltings; a desc. is Mrs. M. A. Porter, Cam- 
bridge, N. Y. 



Children of Aaron Malick and Robert Gaston. 635 

12. III. DANIEL, b. iu the "old stone house" at Bedmr. 38 Oct., 1763, d. in a. w. 
room of same house 9 July, 1815, bur. in Bedminster Ref. Ch. yd.; m. 
first, in 1785, Margaret, dau. of Robert Gaston, of Bedmr., b. 17 Mch.. 
1768, d.lO Sep., 1807, bur. atPluckamin, by whom 10 ch.;m. second, June, 
1808, Catharine Johnston La Rue, b. at Peapack, Somerset Co., 20 Mch., 
1780, d. 34 Apr., 1863, buried at Bedminster; by whom 2 ch. She was the 
dau. of Albert and Catharine Johnston, (he. b. 1735, d.l799, she b. 1745, 
d. 1794); and the wid. of Othniel La Rue, b. 1773, d. 21 July, 1803, whom 
she m. 26 Mch., 1801. La Rue lived on the east side of the Peapack 
road, half a mile north of the " Old Stone House," near the " Folly." 
They had one ch., David O. La Rue, b. 5 July, 1802, d. 24 Oct., 1839, Mur- 
der Creek, Alabama. He was educated at Princeton College, studied 
medicine at Morristown under Dr. Whelpley ; for one year had charge 
of a classical school at Oxford, North Carolina, and then commenced 
practising medicine at Fayetteville, in that state. He afterwards 
establislied himself as a physician in Alabama, where he died. Daniel 
Melick led an active and useful life as a tanner and farmer, 1st as his 
father's partner, and after Aaron's death as his successor. He was a 
member of the Bedminster Reformed Dutch church, held minor posi- 
tions of trust in the township, and was considered a leading man in 
the community. His papers and accounts, that have been preserved, 
show him to have been an excellent penman and a methodical man of 
business. He uniformly spelled his name Melick, though his corres- 
pondents generally addressed him as Malick. After his death his 
widow continued residing in the "Old Stone House," for two years 
when she removed to Van Neste house, on the east side of the North 
Branch about a quarter of a mile below the mouth of the Peapack 
brook. Here she lived with her ch. for two years, when she purchased 
from William Brittou a new house, with a half acre lot at the Cross 
Roads— Bedminster village— adjoining on the west the present store 
and residence of Martin Bunn. In 18.30, she removed to the house of 
her dau., Margaret, who had m. Abrara D. Huff, with whom she 
made her home until her death. (See index of S. O. P., and for Daniel's 
12 ch. see p. 639.) 

13. IV. ELIZABETH, b. at Bedminster, 8 Nov., 1765, injured by falling under the 

grinding wheel of her father's bark mill, 6 May 1768 ; d. 14 May, 1768 ; 
buried at Pluckamin. 

14. V. MARGARET, b. 33 Dec, 1767. m. 13 March, 1789, Joseph, son of Robert Gas- 

ton of Bedminster, b. 19 Nov., 1766, d. 18 April, 1834. He settled in 
Northumberland Co., Penna., where he was a member of the Presby- 
terian church and served as county commissioner ; had ch. 
I. Robert, b. 30 Mch., 1790, d. 23 Sept., 1854, m. Eleanor Shannon, b. 13 Dec, 
1794, d. 13 Oct., 1867 ; he was an elder of the Warrior Run Pres. Ch.; 
their 6 ch., Martha J., b. 1 June, 1826, unm. ; Margaret M., b. 1828, d. 
18.57, unm. ; Solomon P., res. Turbotville, North. Co., Pa., b. 16 Dec, 
1829, m. 5 Nov., 1861, Lydia M. Matchin, b. 10 June, 1839 ; Mary E., b. 
1833, d. 1865, m. 1856, Rev. Henry Q. Graham, now pastor United 
Presb. Ch. at Homer City, Indiana Co., Pa., has 5 ch. ; Charlotte A., 
b. 3 April, 1835 ; Sarah O., b. 1837, d. 1845. 
II. Charlotte, b. 22 Sept., 1793, d. 13 Aug., 1834, m. 1813, James Durham, b. 
1784, d. 1813, a dau., Mrs. Harriet Hansel, lives at Marion, Lynn Co, 
Iowa, 
ni. RoSANNA, b. 17 June, 1795, d. 4 Mch.. 1845. 

IV. Aaron, b. 35 Apl.. 1799. d. 34 Oct., 1868, m. jirst, Sarah Ann Clarke, by 

whom one ch„ Clarice, d. in infancy ; m. second, Rosanna Camp, by 

whom 2ch., John W., b. 28 Mch., 1855 ; Anna Rosa, res. Turbotville, 

b. 26 Jan., 1859, m. 1886, Amos C. Heacock, and has 2 ch. 

V. Daniel, b. 26 July, 1801, d. 28 Apl., 1865, ni. 1839, Rosa Morris, b. 180.3, d. 

1873; was a Presb. minister at Phila. 
VI. Mary, b. 14 May, 1804, d. 11 July, 1880. 
VII. Anne, b. 20 Dec, 1808, m. William Sample. 
15. VI. MARIA, b. at Bedminster, 34 March, 1771, d. 18 Nov., 1834, ra. Solomon Pet- 
erson, settled at Chambersburgh. Pa. : had ch., I. Xic/iolas, b. In 1793, 
d. 7 Jan., 1865, a Presb. minister at Wilmington, Del., m. Elizabeth 



636 Children of Andkew Malick and John Fine. 

Haug-hey, no ch. ; II. CJiarlotte, rn. James McCracken, of Chambers- 
burjrh. Pa. 

THIRD GENERATION (A). 

Andrew Malick (5) had at least 5 ch. 

16. I. CATHARINE. The baptismal record of St. James Lutheran Church, 

Phillipsburgh, N. J., has the entry :— "Parents. Andreas Melijrh & 

frau Catarina. Child, Catarina, b. Apl. 4, 1770, bap. June 3, witnesses 

Christopher Inslee & frau Catarinc." She d. May 8, 1831, ra. 21 Aug., 

1787. Johannes Fine (John Fine) b. 5 June, 1768, d. 11 May. 1826. Church 

record shows them to have been conflrmed together in 1787, he ag'ed 20 

and she 17. and that they partook of their last communion tog'ether in 

Nov. 1825. John Fine was the son of Philip Fine b. 1744, d. 1810, and 

who in 17C7 was living on the Barlcer tract in Alexandria township, 

Hunterdon Co. ; near the close of the last century he built a saw and 

Hour mill on the south side of Musconetcoiig- creek, at Finesville, in 

that Co.; at his death his flour mill was continued by his son ; it is 

now owned by Taylor & Co. and used as a knife factory. John Fine 

early in the century owned 30 acres near AUertown, Hunterdon Co., 

which he sold to Joseph Fritts. He was elected in 181.3, for 4 years 

warden of St. James Lutheran church near Phillipsburgh. John and 

Catharine Fine had 10 ch. :— 

I. Mary, m. William Tinsman, of Warren and Hunterdon Cos., had 8 ch., 

a son ./. F. Tinsman lives at Phillipsburg, N. J.; II. Margaret, 

m. John Tinsman; III. Philip; IV. Barbara, m. Hug:hea. and had 

at least 3 ch.; V. Elizabeth, m. Pursel; VI. Andrew M., m. Hart- 

pense; VII. Sarah, m. John Thompson, of Durham, Pa.; VIII. 

Harriet, m. Beatty Hughes, M. D.; IX. Catherine, m. John 

Thompson of Holland, Hunterdon Co.; X. Hannah, b. 17 Jan., 

1813, d. 2 April, 1864, m. John Derr. b. 4 Sept. 1802, d. 26 April 1864, 

of Springfield Township, Bucks Co.. Pa., a descendent of Johann 

HeinrichDorr, who emigrated from Germany in 1742, landing from 

the ship Loyal Judith from Rotterdam. John and Hannah Derr 

had five ch. that reached adult age; Thompson, Katherine, Henry 

H., John F., and Anarew F.; the last son is now in active business 

at Wilkes-Barre, Pa., being a director of the Anthracite Bank, 

the Miners' Savings Bank, the Osterhout Free Library and a trustee 

of the Memorial Presbj'terian church. 

17. II. REBECCA. The baptismal record of St. James Lutheran church, Phillips- 

burg has the entry :—" Parents, Andreas Molich and frau Catharine, 
child Rebecca, b. May 13, 1776, bap. July 20, 1776. witness, the Parents." 

18. III. JOHANNES (John). The baptismal record of St. James Lutheran church 

at Phillipsburg has the entry :—" Parents, Andreas Molich and frau 
Catarina. Johannes, b. June 29. 1778, bap. July 28, 1778. witnesses, the 
Parents." He d. 21 Nov., 1863, m. flrat Anna Sharps, by whom 3 dau's.; 
m. second, 16 Feb.. 1806, Sarah Melick (H 17), b. 30 Jan., 1787. by whom 1 
dau. ; m. tJiird, Esther, dau. of George Cyphcss, b. 4 Jan., 1788, d. 13 
Oct.. 1801. by whom 9 ch. ; John (18) first lived near Bloomsbury in 
Hunterdon, then removed to Belvidere in Wai-ren. where he kept a 
hotel. (For 13 ch. see p. 641) 

19. IV. JACOB, b. 14 Aug.. 1783, d. 1 Apl. 1819. 

20. V. HANNAH. The baptismal record of St. James' Lutheran church at Phil- 

lipsburg has the entry;— "Parents. Andreas Melek Sr. and frau, 
Catarina. Child Haiina, b. Feb. 27. 1785, bap. May 1, 1785. Witnesses, 
The Parents." She m. 22 May, 1806, Matthias Melick (B 13), b. 6 June, 
1778, d. 5 Mar., 1819; had 2 ch., L Catharine, b. 7 Apl., 1809, II. Marga- 
retta S., b. 27 June. 1811. 

THIRD GENERATION (A). 

Philip Melick (8) had ch. 

21. I. CATHERINE, d. 7 Mch.. 1844, m. 2 Jan., 1786. James Todd. b. about 1765. d. 13 

Mch.. I8i0; he was the son of John Todd a Scotch-Irishman who about 
1749. when some 20 years old. emigrated to America from Longford, 



Ch. of Philip Melick, Jas. Todd, Jacob Van Dyke. 637 

Ireland, with David, a young-er brother. David bought a farm at New 
Germaiitown, N. J., and m. a dau. of John King. Catherine and 
James Todd lived between Pluckamin and Martinsville. He was a 
skilled cultivator of fruit. He served as a private of militia during 
the Revolution and probably in the continental line as after his 
death the government advenised him as entitled to a pension. Had 
6ch. 
I. Philip, d. 1814, from disease contracted in army during war of 1812. 
n. John I., b. 5 Sep., 1788, d. about 1871; his ch., Josejoh, res. Paterson, N. 
J.; Jolin A., res. Tarrytown, N. Y. ; James A., res. Dunellen, N. J.; 
Augustus, res. Bergen Point, N. J. : Maria, m. John Martin, d. at 
Martinsville, N. J., about 1875, no ch.; Catherine. 

III. Martha, b. 8 July, 178G, d. S9 Sep., 1858, m. Elijah Pennington, b. 5 

Dec, 1784, d. 4 June, 1851; their ch. David, b. 1810, d. 1844; Mary, b. 
1827, d. 1849; Catherine, b. 1842, d. 1884; Philip, b. 1815, d. 1886; Lot S., 
M. D., res. Sterling, 111., b. 1812; James T., res. Bunker Hill, 111., b. 
26 May, 1818. 

IV. Maria, m. first, John Martin, m. second, "William Pennington, no ch. 
V. Ann Castner, b. 7 Dec, 1790, d. about 1830, m. David Kirts, dec, no ch. 

VI. David, res. Martinsville, N. J. 

22. II. ELIZABETH, b. 1766, d. 1853, m. Jacob Van Dyke, lived between Pluckamin 

and Martinsville; had 3 ch. 
I. John, b. l May, 1792, d. 9 Apl., 1840, m. 15 Feb., 1817, Margaret Cunning- 
ham, b. 30 Sept., 1794, d. 2 Mch, 1859; their 8 ch., Jacob, h. ISl'i ; James, 
b. 1819, d. in infancy; Philip, b. 1821, d. in infancy; Henry, b. 1823; 
John, b. 1825, d. 1847; Rachell Ann, res. Bound Brook, N. J., b. 1829, 
m. a Mr. McBride; Sarali Elizabeth, b. 1831, d. in infancy; Joseph, 
b. 1824. 
II. Philip, b. 15 Sept., 1794, d. 3 Oct., 1832, m. Hester, dau. of Ebenezer 
Tingley, b. 28 May, 1798, d. 11 Aug., 1863; their 5 ch., Ja7ie Eliza, b. 
1833, d. 1877; John, b. 1824, d. 1847, unm.; Rebecca, res. Newmarket, 
N. J., b. 20 Dec, 1826, m. Jlrst, Archibald Haas, of Bedminster, N. J., 
m. second, Maxson Dunham, of Newmarket; Catherine Ann, b. 1839, 
d. 1858, unm.; Christiana, b. 1841, d. 1863, unm. 
III. Catherine, b. l Jan., 1798, d. 5 Jan., 1876, m. 182.5, Folkert Dow, of Bed- 
minster, N. J., b. 14 Nov., 1802, d. 14 Sept., 1879, their 6 ch., James; 
Elizabeth; Eli; Jacob; Martha; and Elizabeth who m. John Allen. 

23. III. DAVID, said to have settled in Virginia. 

24. IV. JOHN, m. 16 Dec, 1781, Mary Todd, of Hunterdon Co., N. J.; in 1785 he was 

living near Pluckamin in Somerset as in that year he served as an 
administrator of the estate of Matthias Appleman deceasod; later he 
removed to Ohio and d. near Somerset, Perry Co. ; for his 13 ch. see p. 

25. V. FANNY, m. a Herriot. 

26. VI. CHARLOTTE, said to have gone to Virginia with David (2.3). 

27. VII. MARGARET, said to have gone to Virginia with David (33). 

28. VIII. MAGDALENA, m. 2 Jan., 1793, Jeremy Vosseler. 

THIRD GENERATION (A). 

Peter Melick (g) had ch. 

29. I. DAVID, m. JIary Heuston. 

30. II. JOHN, m. Janet Olyphant. 

31. III. CATHERINE, b. 26 Apl., 1771, d. 4 Sep., 1863, m. Enos Muudy, of Somerset 

Co., b. 25 May, 1766, d. 3 Feb., 1841; altho' she lived to be over 90 her 
faculties continued unimpaired enabling her to recall in her last days 
many Revolutionary events (See p. 336) Enos and Catherine Muudy 
settled near Martinsville, Somerset, where many of their desc. still 
live; had8ch. 
I. David, b. 18 July, 1791, d. 19 Nov., 1872. 

II. Lewis, b. 31 July, 1793, d. 27 Feb., 1889. Throughout his long life he 
was a man of sturdy character, strong in his convictions of right, 
and he always commanded the utmost respect from all who knew 
him. He filled various township otHces, for several years was a 
justice of the peace, and from 1840 to 1851 was Judge of the Somer- 



638 Ch. of Enos Mdndy, John Melick, C. Loucks. 

set County Court of Common Pleas. For 70 years he was an active 
member, and among the chief supporters of the Mount Bethel 
Baptist Church. When 94 years old— in 1887— he visited the writer 
at Plainfleld after driving from his home in Washington Valley, 
5 miles away. He walked unsupported, did not wear spectacles, 
and his hair was but slightly gray, it being thiclc and bushy grow- 
ing low on the forehead and about the ears. His son Ira lives at 
Warrenville, Somerset Co., &nA Himemi at Newark; his daughters 
Mrs. Tftomas Codington at Mount Bethel, N. J., and Mrs. Sarah F. 
Haynes at Covington, Ky. 

Til. Frances, b. 27 Nov., 1795, still living— in 1889— in Washington Valley. 

IV. Peteb, b. 15 Sep., 1798, lived and d. at Metuchin, N. J. 
V. Margaret, b. 9 Jan., 1801, dec. m. Washington Leson. 

VI. Catherine, b. 17 May, 1803, was still living in 1887 with her son in 

Kansas. 
Vn. John, b. 9 Oct., 1805, unm. 
VIII. Isaac, b. 3 Oct., 1808, removed to the West. 

FOURTH GENERATION (A). 

John Malick (lo) had ch. 

32. I. SARAH, b. 15 Mch., 1784, d. 11 Dec. 1836, m. 1814, Cornelius Loucks, b. 15 
Mch., 1784, d. 11 Dec, 1826. Had ch. 
I. John C, b. 13 Sep., 1807, d. 5 Oct., 1855, m. 1834, Desdemona Marsh, b. 
1815, d. 1880; their 3 ch., Jane E.. b. 18.3.5, d. 188.3, m. 1871, Jos. W. Hast- 
ings; Cornelius b. 1837, m. 1867, Sarah E. Chown; Leonard, b. 1844, 
d. 1845. 
II. Jane E., b. 13 Dec. 1812, d. 7 Oct., 1848, m. 2 Jan., 1834, George A. Dock- 
stader, of New York City, b. 15 Aug., 1814; their 2 ch., Sarah D.. b. 
18.35, m. 1860, Washington L. Cooper; Theodore O., born 1837, m. 1866, 
Ella E. Bean, address 78 Gold St., N. Y. C. 
.33. II. ELIAS, b. 25 Aug., 1787, d. in Michigan 7 Mch., 1865. m. 18 Mch., 1812, Sarah 

dau. of Daniel Graft, b. 1793, d. 24 Dec. 1854; for his 12 ch. see p. 642. 
34. III. CHARLOTTE, b. 23 June, 1788, d. 15 May, 1851, m. 6 Dec, 1810, Peter Kilts, b. 
8 Dec, 1789, d. 6 Aug., 1828, bad ch., 
I. Daniel, res. Sharon Hill, N. Y., m. Maria Ball, their 10 ch., Peter; 
Lorenzo; Daniel; Mary; Charles; George; Edward; Ida; Minnie; 
Anna. 
n. Jane, m. John Hyney, their 10 ch., Peter; John; Daniel; Mary; Char- 
lotte; Cfiarles; Abzina; Belle; Levi; Xe/ta. 

III. Charlotte, res. St. Joseph, Mo., m. Silas Somers; their 4 ch., Ladaska, 

Mineriut; Eninn; Alvina. 

IV. Sarah, res. Cobleskill, N. Y., m.flrst, Horace Foster; m. second, Fred- 

erick Quackenbush; no ch. 
V. Lydia, res. Sioux City, Iowa, b. 20 Sep., 1823, m. 31 Dec, 1844, Jacob A. 
Ressegieu, b. 2 Sep., 1822, had 7 ch., Harriet X, b. 1845, m. Stephen 
C. Hathaway; Jielle, b. 1847, m. Linns E. Skinner; Edwin J., b. 1849; 
Winjleld S., b. 1852; . b. 1854. Horace F. d. 1856; Frank. D., res. Beaver 
Creek, Minn., b. 1857; Fred. H., twin, b. 1857. 
VI. Eliza, dec. 

VII. Elizabeth, m. George Ball ; their 3 ch., Frederick, and 2 who d. in 
infancy. 

36. IV. ELIZABETH, b. 26 Sep., 1791, d. in Canada; m. 29 July, 1810, Samuel Haner; 

had 6 ch., 
I. Cornelius; II. Jane; m. a Buell; III. Sarah, m. a Reese; IV. Lydia 
ra. a Van Dusen; V. John. 
■36. V. AARON, b. 24 Mar. 1794, d. in Schoharie Co., N. Y.. 18 July; 1850. m. 9 July 
1818, Anna dau. of Peter De Reraer, b. 5 Dec. 1801. d. 22 May, 1878 (for 
his. 3 ch. see p. 043. 

37. VI. FANNY, d. in Wisconsin, m. John Scott, had 9 ch., I. Elias, res. Raymond, 

Wis., b. 2 Apl., 1817, m. Hannah Kilmartin; II. Mary Ann, m. John 
Neahr; III. Jane, m. Horton; IV. Eliza, m. Jones; V. Lydia, ra. 
Lorenzo Deremer; VI. John, res. Raymond, Wis., m. Helen Towers; 
VIL Sarah, m. West; VIII. Cornelius; IX. Spencer. 



Ch. of J. Salisbury, Dan. Melick, Den. Van Duyn. 639 

38. Vn. PETER, b. 10 Apl., 1801, d. 4 May, 1865, ra. 13 May, 1823, Caroline Tymeson ; 

(for 2 ch. see p. 643.) 

39. VIII. HANNAH, b. 15 Aug-., 1804, d. 28 Mch, 1874, m. 5 Jan, 1825, Jacob Salisbury, 

b. 22 Dec, 1802; d. 9 Dec, 1879; had 8 ch.. 
I. John H., b. 29 Jan., 18.34, dec, m. 1860, Catherine dau. of Barney 
Ochampaugh; their 4 ch., Cora A., b. 1863; Dora B., b. 1869; Alva J., 
b. 1876, May, b. 1879. 
n. Nicholas Patterson, res. Middlefleld, Otsego Co., N. Y., b. 29 June 

1826, m. Sarah Jane dau. of John Oothout. 
ni. Charlotte Jane, b. 9 May, 1829, d. in infancy. 
IV. Sarah, b. 19 Oct., 1831, d. in infancy. 
V. Louisa, b. 23 May, 18.37, m. William H. Darling. 
VI. Aaron, res. Cherry Valley, Otsego Co., N. Y., b. 31 Mch., 1840, m. 

Joanna, dau. of Edward Griffln. 
VII. Peter, b. .30 Nov., 1844, d. unm. 
VIII. Jacob, b. 19 Apl.. 1841, d. unm. 

40. IX. JANE, b. 10 Apl., 1807, d. In Iowa, m. Daniel Webster; their sons Daniel 

and John live at Ossian, Minishic Co., Iowa. 

FOURTH GENERATION (A.) 
Daniel Melick (12) had ch. by first wife. 

41. I. AARON, b. 1 Apl., 1786, d. 7 Dec, 1814, unm., served in war of 1812, d. from 

fever contracted while stationed at Sandy Hook. 

42. II. ELIZABETH, b. 25 Mch., 1788, d. at Albion, Mich., 21 July 1851, m. in " Old 

Stone House," Bedminster, N. J., by Rev. Charles Hardenbnrg, 3 
Jan., 1816, to Dennis Van Duyn, of Peapack, b. .31 Dec, 1791, d. 18 Nov., 
1879. He was a desc. of Garret Cornelisq, a wheelwright who emi- 
grated to New Utrecht, L. I., from ZwoUe, Prov. of Overyssel, in 
the Netherlands. This immigrant's grandsons William andDenyse, 
who founded the N. J. family, were living on the Raritan before 
1702. Dennis and Elizabeth (42) Van Duyn removed to Romulus, N. 
N. Y., thence to Mich. ; their 3 ch. 
I. Mary M., res. Albion, Mich., b. 26 Nov., 1822, m. 6 Mch., 1842, Newell 

Fleming, b. 16 Sep., 1818, d. 8 July 1880. T\ie\T2 ch., Llewellyn, ves. 

Sault Ste. Marie, Chippewa Co., Mich., b. 1853, m. 1882, Nelly D. 

Hopkins and has 3 ch. ; Eliza M., res. Albion, b. 1855, m. 1884, Irving 

C. Poster, M D. 
II. Anna M., b. 24 Mch., 1825, m. June, 1851, David M. Crane, b. 4 May, 1827, 

d. 26 June, 1875: their 2 ch. ; £r« £., res. Allegan, Mich., b. 1852, m. 

1876, D. N. Garrison; /Horace D., res. Cheshire, Allegan Co., Mich., b. 

1857, m. 1878, Addle J. Hooker. 
III. Delia Coe, b. 9 Dec, 1828, d. 27 Oct., 1880, m. 11 May 1852. Anson Thomp- 
son, b. 1 Nov., 1816, d. 21 Sep., 1884; their 4 ch., Frederick, b. 1854, m 

1879, Etta L. Crawford; jr«;mm 5., b. 1855, m. 1888, Nelly B. Cran- 

son; 4?i)«'; b. 1858; George A., b. 1860. 

43. III. CHARLOTTE, b. 7 Mch., 1790, d. 9 Jan., 1861 unm. ; lived a useful and busy 

life with her 3 brothers in the " Old Stone House," and d. of paralysis 
seated in her rocking-chair in the llvin.!? room. She had a great heart 
and many virtues and was much beloved by the entire community. 
The name of "Aunt Charlotte" having been as a sweet savor in the 
nostrils of Bedminster people. 

44. IV. ROSANNAH, b. 14 Apl., 1812, d. 12 Mch., 18.59, m. by Rev. Mr. Galpin at 

Laming-ton, William J- Todd, b. 1 Oct., 1792, d. 12 Aug., 1870. They set- 
tled and always lived on a farm near Peapack in Bedminster tp., on 
road running to the Larger Cross Roads; had 4 ch. 
I. John, b. 1821, d. 1829. 

II. Nicholas Paterson, b. 21 Feb., 1824, m. 17 Oct., 18.50, Margaret, dau. of 
James Honeyman, of Peapack, b. 15 Mch., 1826; their 8 ch., Esther 
Ann, res. Asbury Park, N. J., b. 1852; William J., h. 185.3, d. In 
infancy; James //., res. Lakewood, N. J., b. 1856, m. Eliza Bagley, 
and has 2 ch, ; Susan H., res. Paisley, N. J., b. 1858 m. George 
Brooks; David E., res. Lakewood, b. 1800; Rosanna, b. 1863, unm.; 
Margaret, res. Ocean Beach, N. J., b. 1866, unm., llerhert O., b. 1871, 
unm. 



640 Ch. of Dan. Melick, Wm. J. Todd, Peter Sutphkn. 

III. David M., b. aS Sep., 182C, m. at Peapack parsouajreS Oct., 1863, Caroline 

Wolf; he succeeded his father on the homestead farm; their one 
ch., June Space. 

IV. William Hauvey b. 15 June, 1830, d. 30 June, 1889, at Malaga, Glouces- 

ter Co., N. J., unm. 
46. V. JOHN, b. 5 Apl., 1794, d. 3 Oct.. 1850, m. 30 June, 182:2, Ann, dau. of Joseph 
Nevius, of Bedrainsterb. 28 Feb., 1801, d. 9 Oct., 1876; (Seep. 251). He 
succeeded his father in the tannery and lived in the Bedminster 
stone liouse; had one ch. 

I. Elizabeth, b. 10 Oct., 1824, d. 31 May, 1880, ra. by Rev. George Schenck 

at home 13 Nov., 1850 to John Gordon Van Dyke, b. 24 Feb., 1822; 
their ch., John M., b. 1851; Henry Xevius b. 1853, is now curator of 
Princeton college. 

46. VI. MAKY, b. 9 Apl.. 1796, d. 26 Apl., 1833, m. 26 Mch., 1826, in "Old Stone House" 

by Rev. J. M. Fisher, to Peter Sutphen of Bedminster, b. 5 Dec, 1800, d. 
1875; they lived at the Lesser Cross-Roads— now Bedminster village- 
he aboutthe time of his marriage having built the dwelling and store 
of late owned and occupied by Martin Bunn; had 3 ch. 
I, Peteu Theodoub, b. 27 Feb., 1827, d. 2 Feb., 1884, m. 21 May. 1859, Eliza- 
beth H., dau. of Jacob Haas of Peapack, b. 21 Feb., 1831; he gradu- 
ated in 1859 at the Mod. Coll. of the University of Pa., and practised 
medicine at Peapack and Bedminster; their 4 ch., Mary Meliclc, b. 
1860, d. 1803; Frederick Cornell, b. 1862, m. 1884, Susie Eugenia, dau. 
of James R. Spinning of N. Y., and bas2cb,, he graduated at the 
Med. School of N. Y. University and is now practising medicine at 
Liberty Corner, N. J.; Williatn Boyd, b. 1866, d. in infancy; Lizzie 
Rue, res. Libertj' Corner, b. 1868, is studying medicine with her 
bi'other. 

II. Catherine, b. 11 Aug., 1829, d. Oct., 18.31. 

III. William P., b. 8 Aug., 1832, m. 19 Dec, 1861, by Rev. Henry P. Thomp- 
son, to .lane, dau. of Watson C. Allen of Peapack; on the death of 
his mother he was taken home by Charlotte (43) and David (47) to 
the "Old Stone House" where he still resides, having succeeded 
David (47) on the farm. He has always been active in public affairs, 
has been a member of the state legislature, has repeatedly been 
elected collector, assessor, town clerk, and to other township 
olBces. (See preface.) 

47. VII. DAVID, b. 6 Apl., 1798, d. unm., 12 July, 1870, from injuries received July 

9 by being gored by a bull. He succeeded his father on "the Old 
Farm," was the head of the family in the stone house, was highly 
esteemed for his probity and upright character, and filled many posi- 
tions of honor and trust in the community. 

48. VIII. WILLIAM, b. 31 Jan., 1800, d. 10 Dec. 1861, at New Liberty, Indiana, m. 3 

Dec, 1823, at residence of Nicholas Arrosmith, Bedminster, by Revd. 
Wm. Galpin, to Mariah, dau. of Abraham Suydam, b. 10 May, 1801, d. 
24 Sept., 1879. William, 5 May, 1825, purchased from Rozanna (44), John 
(45), Mary (46) and David (47), 53 acres of the homestead farm, on which 
he erected dwelling and farm buildings at the corner ol the Peapack 
and Holland roads. He sold this land in 1829 to Joseph Nevius, who 
sold in 18U to Nicholas Arrosmith. whose estate conveyed in 1844 to 
D. G. Schomp, and by him it was sold in 1858 to Benjamin Opie, whose 
son Frank is now the owner and occupant. In 18;^, William (48) 
moved to East Enterprise, Switzerland Co., Ind., where he purchased 
a farm and permanently settled. (For his 10 ch. see p. 044). 

49. IX. DANIEL, b. 18 Jan., 1802, d. unmarried. 30 March, 1870, lived in the "Old 

Stone House," aided John (4.5), in the tannery and David (47), on the 
farm. He was much of his life a semi-invalid. 

50. X. CATHERINE, b. 9 Nov. 1804, d. 20 Apl., 1861, at Grass Lake, Mich., m. one 

Sunday morning, at the "Old Stone House" by the Rev. Isaac M. 
Fisher, to John Allen, b. 22 Nov., 1802; had 7 ch.; I. Andrew M, b. 26 
July, 1828, II. Theodore S., b. 17 Oct., 1830, m. 8 Aug., 1863, Elizabeth 
Matthews, III. Stephen, b. 19 Jan., 1833, IV. Margaret Gaston, K 7 
Feb., 18.35, d. 1840, V. Deborah Esther, b. 20, Nov., 1837, m. and living 
in Maine, VI. Isaac Sylvester, b. 10, Apl., 1840, VII. Paul, b. 21, 
June, 1843. d. 1848. 



Ch. of Daniel Melick and Abram D. Huff. 641 
fourth generation (a). 

Daniel Melick (12) had ch., by his second wife. 

51.' I. MARGARET, b. 2 Jan.. 1809. d. 13 Sept., 1886, buried at Bedminster, m. 27 
Nov., 1830, at Lesser Cross Roads, by Revd. I. M. Fisher, to Abram D. 
Huff, b. 26 Dec. 1804, d. 7 Apl., 1883. Alter marriag-e they occupied the 
Van der Veer, now the Ludlow farm, below Bedminster Church. 
About 1832 they purchased from the heirs of Van Tyne the farm of 
150 acres lying north of and adjoining- the village of Lesser Cross 
Roads,— Bedminster— where they lived until death; had ch. 
I. Elizabeth, res. Somerville, N. J., b. 25 Sep., 1832, unm. 
IL Catherine A., res. Roycefield, N. J., b. l Mch., 1835, m. 23 Nov., 1864, 
Albert Amraerman of Bridgewater, Tp.. b. 20 Dec, 183S; their one 
ch., Andrew Melicic, res. Bedminster, b. 1S3S, m. 1889, Caroline, dau. 
of Clarlie Todd, of Bedminster; Andrew owns and occupies the 
homestead farm of his grand-parents (51). 

III. David La Rue, res. Bedminster, b. 15 Mar., 1838, m. 6 Jan., 1864, Hen- 

rietta Van Arsdale, of Pluckamin, b. 15 Apl., 1843; their 6 ch., 
Tda L. II.; Charlotte M.; Elizabeth; Margaret; Charles H.; Mary 
r. A.; 

IV. Dennis A., res. Somerville, N. J., b. 26 Sep. 1840. 
V. Mart M., b. 1 Apl., 1843, d. in infancy. 

VI. Charlotte, b. 27 Mch., 1844, d. 23 June, 1863, unm. 

VII. Mary M., res. Bedminster, b. 14 Feb., 1848, m. 13 Jan., 1870, William C. 
Poulson, b. 8 Oct., 1847; their 7 ch., Herbert E.; George M.; Louis 
v.; Mabel S.; Augusta S.; A7ina A.; Grace W. 
VIII. Ellen, res. Somerville, b. 25 Dec, 1851. 

52. II. ANDREW D., b. 7 Apl., 1811, m. 9 June, 1841, by Rev. John C. Cruikshank to 

Elizabeth Dunn, dau. of Simeon Ayres, of New Brunswick, N. J., b. 26 
Oct., 1822. In his youth he went to New Brunswick and obtained 
employment with the grocery and shipping firm of James Bishop & 
Co., where he remained until he became a partner (See p. 585) 
Andrew D. Mellick (52) as he spells his name and as do his descendants, 
during his N. B. residence was a member of the common council, for 
many years was a director of the State bank and was active in the fire 
dept. as foreman of Engine Co. No. 1. In 1844 he removed to the city 
of New York, becoming a member of the wholesale grocery firm of 
Beale, Mellick & DeWitt, at 3 and 5 Bridge street, and 30 Pearl street, 
this house held a leading position in the trade until overwhelmed by 
the panic of 1857. He first lived in New York in Clinton Place, but in 
1845 purchased the brick dwelling No. 20 West 9th street, in which he 
lived until he removed to Bergen Point, N. J., in the spring of 1855. 
While living in New York he was a member of the board of trustees, 
of the first Presbyterian church, and aided in completing its edifice on 
the corner of 5th avenue and nth street. Ho was a director of the 
American Exchange Bank, and of the National Fire Insurance Co., and 
a member of the New York Historical Society. In New Jersey he was 
active and foremost in developing that portion of Hudson Co. in the 
■way of locating and laying out streets, establishing grades and other 
important improvements preliminary to the founding of the city of 
Bayonne. For his 8 ch. see p. 645. 

FOURTH GENERATION (A). 

John Melick (18) had ch. by Jird wife. 

53. I. CATHERINE, d. in Infancy. 

54. n. ELIZABETH, m. William Stewart. 

55. III. HANNAH, m. James Depow. 

John (18) had ch. by second wife. 

56. IV. MARY ANNA, d. in infancy. 

41 



642 Ch. of John Melick op Belvidere N. J., & of Ohio. 

John (i8) had ch. by third wife. 

57. V. ANDREW, b. 14 Oct., 1812, d. 2.3 May. 1867, m. Anna Maria Albright of Belvi- 

dere, N. J., b. 26 Apl., 1814. d. 16 Oct., 1869; had 6 ch. 
I. Anne Elizabeth, b. 12 Oct.. ias7. d. 21 Nov., 1839. 
II. Jahbs Irvin. res. Lapeer, Mich., b. 1 Sep., 1839, m. Sep., 1871, Georgi- 
anna C. Browii. 

III. Henry Southard, res. Buffalo, N. Y., b. 14 Aug., 1842, m. 3 June, 1874, 

Nelly Catlin. 

IV. George King, res. Lambertville, N. J., b. 29 July, 1845, m. 22 Jan.. 1873, 

Eliza Applcgate; their ch., Emily A., b. 1880, d. in infancy; Percy 
A.,\). 1888. 
V. Sharps, res. Belvidere, N. J., b. 26 Oct.. 1847, m. 26 July, 1871, Mary C, 

Ross, b. 11 Dec, 1852; their 2 ch., Annie, b. 1873, Nelly, b. 1878. 
VI. Phineas Kennedy, b. 5 June, 1850, d. in infancy. 

58. VI. GEORGE, m. Louisa Bradley of Belvidere; had 4 ch., 

I. William, dec; II. Emma, dec; III. Paul, dec; IV. Percy. 

59. VII. ANNA MARIA, dec. 

60. VIII. PETER SHARPS, res. Eastou, Pa., in. Maria Innis, no ch. 

61. IX. SARAH, res. Bloomsbury, Columbia Co., Pa., unm. 

62. X. MATILDA, dec 

63. XI. JOHN, dec. 

64. XII. CHARLOTTE, res. West Pittston, m. Lewis C. Gordon, publisher. 

65. XIII. MARY, dec. 

FOURTH GENERATION (A). 

John Melick (24) had ch. 

66. I. MARY, b. 1 Jan., 1778, m. a Drake. 

67. II. WILLIAM, b. 4 Nov., 1779, lived and d. in Perry Co., Ohio, a son, Alexan- 

der, now lives at Somerset in that Co. 

68. III. JANE, b. 31 May, 1781, d. 21 Sep., 1846, m Jlrst. Joshua Lobdell, d in 1812, 

seconcl, Bailey; by first husband had 3 ch. 

I. Sarah, res. Lyons, Iowa, m. John Mathes. 

II. Zenobia, dec. m. Charles Hummel, dec. 
III. John, res. La Fontaine, Ind., b. 1809. 

69. IV. JOHN, b. 7 May, 1783; lived and d. in Perry Co., O. ; no ch. 

70. V. DAVID, b. 2 Nov., 1784. d. in Knox Co., O., 16 Sep., 1867, m. Hannah, dau. of 

Timothy Hankins. b. 4 July, 1789, d. 12 Mch., 1853; he served in war of 
1812; for his 13 ch. see p. 647. 

71. VI. GEORGE, twin, b. 2 Nov., 1784, lived and d. in Knox Co., O., his son Rob- 

ert lives at Toledo, Iowa. 

72. VII. REBECCA, b. 21 Dec, 1786, d. about 1849, m. Wilson. 

73. VIII. ELIZABETH. 

74. IX. JONAS, b. 12 Mch., 1790, lived and d. in Knox Co., O., surviving several 

wives; his sons. Aaron, Noah, Harrison, and Jefferson live at 
Sparta, Morrow Co.. and his son Green bury at Bladensburg, O. 

75. X. ELEANOR, b. 20 Oct., 1791. 

76. XI. AARON, b. .30 May, 1794, disappeared in youth. 

77. XII. NATHAN, b. 24 Apl.. 1796. 

78. XIII. ROBERT, b. 29 Nov., 1798. 

FIFTH GENERATION (A). 

Elias Malick (33) had ch. 

79. I. JOHN, res. Canajoharic, N. Y., b. 1 Mar., 181.3, m. 20 Mar., 1836, Anna Eliza, 

dau. of Lawrence Moshel; for his 7 ch. see p. 648. 

80. II. DANIEL, res. Coblesklll, Schoharie Co., N. Y., b. 20 Aug., 1814, m. 15 Sep.. 

18.36, Lena Ann, dau. of John Young, b. 29 June, 1817; his 3 ch., 
I. Sarah, b. 2 Nov., 1829, m. 2 Oct., 1861, Harrison Young; their one ch. 
Wilhur b. 20 Oct., 1863. 

II. Augusta, b. 17 July, 1843, ra. 9 Jan., 1861, James Ottman, their 2 ch., 

Elsworth, b. 15 Jan., 1862; Milo, b. 28 May, 1864. 

III. Cassik, b. 15 Oct., 1851, m. 14 Dec, 1872, George Rockfellow; their 2 oh., 
* Afnna, h. 22 May, 1875; Pearl, b. 21 Nov., 1881. 



Children of Elias, Aaron and Peter Malick. 643 

81. III. PHILIP, res. Schoharie, N. Y., b. 29 July, 1816, m. Nancy Brown, b. 1818; 

their 3 ch., 
I. Charles, b. 1830. 

II. Helen, b. 1842, m. Elin Barroes; their 3 cji., George, b. 1866; Philip, b. 
1876; Zeia, b. 1877. 
III. Nancy, b. 1844, m. Zina Spawn; their 4 ch., ITla, b. 1867; Franklin, b. 
1870; Burton, b. 1876; Fay, b. 1878. 

82. rv. AARON, res. Cobieskill, N. Y., b. 18 Aug., 1818, m. 10 Nov., 1842, Alice A., 

dau. of Solomon Underbill, b. 23 July, 1821; had 1 ch., 

I. Perry G., b. 6 May, 1844, d. 30 June, 1883, m. 9 Dec, 1869, Elizabeth, dau. 

of Conrad Brandenstcin; their 4 ch.. Bertha, b. 1872; Everett, b. 
1875; Alpheda, b. 1880; Ferry, b. 1883. 

83. V. CHARLOTTE, b. 19 Aug., 1820, d. 1 Aug., 1854, m. in 1840, Alexander Young, b. 

1 June, 1817, dec, had 2 ch., 
I. Calvin G., res. Battle Creek, Mich., b. 17 Oct., 1845. 
n. Henrietta, res. Cedar Rapids, Boone Co., Neb., b. 7 Feb., 1848, m. in 
1867, Fredk. Heiser, b. 1845. 

84. VI. JANE, b. 10 July, 1822, d. 25 Mch., 1877, m. 1840, Jacob Moshell, b. 1 June, 

1819, dec ; no ch. 

85. VII. PETER, b. 3 Aug., 1824, m. Jane Graft, b. at Decatur, N. Y., 21 Sep., 1830, 

d. 22 Sep., 1863, had 3 ch., 
I. Erwin, b. 4 Apl., 1854; II. Lester, b. 1856, d. in infancy; III. Howard, 
b. 1857, d. 1862. 

86. VIII. MARGARET, res. Battle Creek, Mich., b. 7 Aug., 1826, m. 27 Apl., 1871, 

John J. Almendinger, b. 18 May, 183.3. 

87. IX. ELIZABETH, b. 3 Jan., 1828, d. 21 Sep., 1842. 

88. X. MARY CATHERINE, res. Battle Creek, Mich., b. 14 July, 1831, m. 23 Sep., 

1854, Elijah Jones, b. 26 Dec, 1826, had 5 ch., 
I. Howard, b. 1858, dec. ; II. Lily, res. Battle Creek, b. 2 July, 1860, m. 28 
Dec, 1887, Edward Piper Junr.; III. Newell A., b. 12 Sep., 1863; 
IV. Edwin H., b. 22 Feb., 1865; V. Estella, b. 31 Oct., 1874. 

89. XI. ANDREW J., res. West Windsor, Eaton Co., Mich., b. 12 Apl., 1834, m. 

Adeline Baxter; had 3 ch., I. Mary, d. in infancy; II. Esther A; III. 
Emma J. 

90. XII. ANNE ELIZA, b. 9 Sept., 1837, d. in infancy. 

FIFTH GENERATION (A). 
Aaron Malick (36J had ch. 

91. I. JANE ANN, res. Argusville, Schoharie Co., N. Y., b. 24 July, 1819, m. 14 Dec, 

1836, R. V. S. Ramsey, b. 3 Dec, 1818; had 1 ch., 
I. Seth, b. 13 Sep., 1837. 

92. n. SARAH, of Argusville, N. Y., b. 30 Dec, 1826, d. 19 Apl., 1887, m. 22 Sep., 1847. 

Henry C. Lycker, b. 6 Sep., 1821. 

93. in. MARIETTA, res. Cobieskill, N. Y., b. 6 Jan., 1830, m. 23 Jan., 1850, Orville 

Hodge, b. 12 July, 1822, merchant, and for 28 years postmaster; has 4 
ch., 
I. Annette, b. 24 Jan., 1851, m. 21 July, 1869, Luther S. Taylor, b. 24 May, 
1848; their 2 ch., Orville, b. 1871; Grace, b. 1873. 

II. Carrie, b. 17 Apl., 18.57, d. 14 Jan., 1871. 

III. Lester, b. 8 Dec, 1859, m. 14 July, 1886, Minnie, dau. of Morton A. Em- 

pie. 

IV. Leland, b. 26 July, 1864; res. of all the ch. Cobieskill, N. Y. 

FIFTH GENERATION (A). 

Peter Malick (38) had ch. 

94. I, JOHN, res. Galesburg. 111., b. 18 Sep., 1825, m. 8 Feb. 1849, Elmira Anthony, b. 

1825, d. 16 Jan, 1876, had ch., I. Charles, b. 1850, d. 1851; II. Edwin, b. 
1853, d. 1854; III. John, res. Galesburg, b. 23 Apl., 1855; IV. Ida. b. 31 
July, 1857; V. Emma, b. 12 May, 1859; VI. Charles, b. 31 Aug., 1861; 
VII. Norman, b. 13 Apl., 1863; VIII. Anthony, b. 13 Mch., 1865; TX. 
Anna, b. 5 Aug. 1867; X. Elizabeth, b. 27 Apl. 1869. 



644 Ch. of Wm. Sprono, Wm. Melick, S. Ricketts. 

96. II. JANE, b. 35 Apl., 1834, d. 17 Dec, 1865, m. Wm. E. Sprong, b. 17 Mch., 1818, d. 
38 Feb., 1884, at Sharon Springs, N. Y.. had 6 ch., 
I. Esther, b. 14 Apl.. 1843, d. 3 June, 1866, m. 1864, Norman E. Curtiaa, 

dec.; no ch. 
II. Mary, res. Sharon Springs, b. 10 Nov., 1844, m. 14 Mch., 1868, David A. 

Merenesa, b. 30 June, 1844; no ch. 
in. Irwin W., b. 31 Dec, 1846, d. 13 Apl., 1849. 

IV. Norman A., res. Grand Kapids, Mich., b. 38 Jan., 1849, m. 9 Dec, 1874. 
Huldah, dau. of Major Wm. Bingham, of Le Grange, Ind. ; 3 ch., 
WiUiam, d. 1878; Arthur B., b. 1881. 
V. Laura E., rea. Central Bridge, N. Y., b. 36 Sep., 1857, m. 16 May, 1877, 
Henry Austin, of Albany; their 3 ch., Ethel M., b. 1878; Henry S., b. 
1880. 
VI. Adella, J., b. 34 Jan., 1861. 

FIFTH GENERATION (A). 
William Melick (48) had ch. 

96. J.. MARGARETTA, b. 8 Oct. 1834, m. 16 Oct. 1843, Stephen Kicketts, b. 25 Jan., 

1831; had 10 ch. 
I. Francis M., b. 2-Z July, 1843, d. 33 July, 1883, at Freno, Cal., m. Cordelia 

Cole; 6 ch. • 

U. Mary E., b. 13 June, 1845, m. 35 Jan., 1864, John Conner, 4 ch. 

III. LUCRETIA, J., b. 66 June, 1847. m. 17 Apl., 1873, H. J. Cole, 5 ch. 

IV. Andrew M., res. Cross Plains, Ripley Co., Ind., b. 36 Dec, 1849, m. 1 

Dec, 187S, Molly Pall. 
V. Joseph W., res. East Enterprise, Ind., b. 4 Nov., 1852, m. 29 Oct., 1880, 
Harriet Lock wood; 6 ch. 
VI. Phebe, res. Aberdeen, Ind., b. 4 Oct., 1854, m. 2 July, 1873, Elwood 

Bovard ; 5 ch. 
VII. Ollie E., of E. Enterprise, Ind., b. 17 Mch., 1857, d. 14 Apl., 1886, m Jas- 
per W. Sadlier; 1 ch. 
VIII. Emeline, b. 1 Jan., 1860, d. in infancy. 
IX. William C, res. E. Enterprise, Ind.. b. 13 Feb., 1863. m. 36. Oct.. 1884. 

Mary Seymour; 1 ch. 
X. Inez C. b. 30 Sep.. 1869. m. 36 Dec. 1886. Oliver?. Lock wood. 

97. II. DANIEL, res. E. Enterprise, Ind.. b. 13 Aug.. 1836. m. 9 Sep., 1847, Elizabeth 

Myers, b. in Cincinnati, O., 18 Mch., 1839; had 13 ch. 
I. Louisa, d. in infancy. 
II. William, b. 3 Aug., 1849, d. 15 Jan., 1865. 

III. Burr, b. 3 Oct., 1851, d. in infancy. 

IV. George B., res. Tuerquis Grove, Switzerland Co., Ind., b. 21 Mch., 1853, 

m. 20 Dec, 1874, Matilda Byrara, b. 1 Sep., 1850; their 3 ch., Celia, b. 
1876; Stella, b. 1879; Ernest, b. 1880. 
V. Charles, res. Springtield, Bonhomme Co., Dak., b. 17 June, 1855, m. 23 
Feb., 1881, Carrie, dau. of Edward J. Monfore, b. 1 July, 1859; their 
one ch.. Alia Belle, b. 1888. 
VI. Harriet, res. Aurora, Ind., b. 26 Nov., 1856, m. 39 Oct., 1876, Griffith, 

Oak; their one ch., Flora, b. 1877. 
VII. Mary D.. res. Patriot. Ind., b. 31 May, 1859, m. James Oak; their l ch., 

Davici. 
VIII. LoRiNG, res. Milo, Warren Co.. Iowa, b. 10 Apl., 1861, m. 1 Mar., 1883. 
Jane, dau. of Lindley Murray Boles, b. 1860; their 1 ch., Elizabeth, 
b. 1884. 
IX. John. res. Milo. Iowa. b. 14 Apl., 1863 m. 15 Mar., 1886, Martha, dau. of 
Fredk. Lohse, of Knoxville, Iowa, b. 1864. 
X. Gordon V., b. 10 Sep., 1865. 
XI. Ida J., b. 35 Mch.. 1867. 
XII. Clarence W., b. 10 Jan., 1870. 

98. III. NICHOLAS A., of Madelia, Watonwan Co., Minn., b. 39 Apl., 1838, d. 28 

Rep., 1889, m. laH Phebe C. Bradford, b. in Switz. Co., Ind., 26 Jan., 
1836; he was an obliging and sympathetic neighbor, an honorable citi- 
zen and consistent Christian, and had been a member of the Baptist 
cliurch at St. James since Its organization ; had 4 ch. 



Ch. of Joseph Myers and Andrew D. Mellick. 645 

I. William B., b. 22 Jan., 1855, d. in infancy. 
n. Clarence B., b. 13 Apl., 1856, d. In infancy. 
m. Mary A., b. 6 Dec, 1858, d. in infancy. 
IV. LOUELLA, b. 15 Feb.. 1862. 
99. rV. CATHERINE L., b. 30 July, 1830, d. 13 Oct., 1831. 

100. V. JOSEPH G.. res. E. Enterprise, Ind., b. 13 May, 18.32, m. 29 Dec, 1853, Betsy 

Abigail Bliss, b. in Stratford, Fulton Co., N. Y., 5 Nov., 1831, no ch. 

101. VI. EMELINE, of Hamilton, Butler Co., Ohio, b. 5 June, 1834, m. 17 Feb., 1852 

Joseph Myers, b. 11 Aug., 1824; had 8 ch. 
I. William J., b. 16 Jan., 1864, d. 26 Feb., 1865. 
n. Isaac, res. Omaha, Neb., b. 1856, m. 1879, Susan A. Davis, 3 ch. 
in. Charles, res. Hamilton, O., b. 22 May, 1858, m. 7 Sep., 1887, Bozetta 

Coleman, 2 ch. 
IV. Albert, b. 7 Dec, 1860. 
V. Flora, b. 20 Apl.. 1864, m. ; 2 ch. 
VI. James S., b. 6 Feb., 1873. 
VII. Joseph A., b. 1875, d. 1881. 
VIII. Emma E., b. 2 Oct.. 1880. 

FIFTH GENERATION (A.) 

Andrew D. Mellick (52) had ch. 

103. I. SIMEON ATRES. b. .30 Nov.. 1842, d. at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, 31 July, 
1862. At the outset of the War of the Rebellion, at the age of 18, he 
went to the front as a 3nd lieutenant in the first cavalry co. that vol- 
unteered for the war. It was subsequently embodied with the First 
N. Y. Mounted Rifles, and he was successively promoted to be a first 
lieutenant and captain. At the time of his death— though not yet 20 
years old— he commanded troop B and ranked as senior captain of his 
reg't. His command was for the first 6 months stationed at Fortress 
Monroe and at Hampton, doing scouting and vidette service while 
McClellan was investing Yorktown. For a time Captain Mellick's 
troop was detailed as a body-guard to Major General Wool, then in 
command of Eastern Virginia. His regt. led the advance at the cap- 
ture of Norfolk and Suffolk and remained in the vicinity of the lat- 
ter place till the end of the year. In June 1862 while scouting between 
Suffolk and the North Carolina line he was seized with swamp fever. 
Being joined by a younger brother (103) he was taken to the Atlan- 
tic Hotel, at Norfolk, remaining there a month, nursed by his brother, 
and attended by Doctor Wright of that city — who was afterwards 
hung. — A furlough having been obtained he was placed on board the 
hospital ship St. Mark, then lying in Hampton Roads and shortly 
expecting to sail for the north with sick and wounded from McClel- 
lan's array, which had then just reached Harrison's bar. Before the 
vessel left the harbor, exactly one year from the day of his arrival 
in Virginia, he died aged 19 years and 8 months. His brother brought 
his body home and it wasburied in Greenwood. Thus briefly lived 
and honorably died one who in many respects was distinguished 
above his follows. He was an able and brave officer, and highly 
esteemed as a citizen and a soldier. His person was handsome, his 
presence winning, and he readily made warm attachments. While 
possessing great vivacity and spirit his nature was reflective and 
thoughtful, and. for one so young, his maturity in mind and appear- 
ance was most extraordinary. His conversation and bearing did not 
appear as of one at the threshold of life, but impressed all with whom 
he came in contact as being that of a man who had benefited by the 
experiences of many years. From the many testimonials as to his 
character and worth, the two following extracts are selected : — 

Head Quarters 8th Array Corps. 
Baltimore. October 2nd. 1862. 

• • » » Major-General Wool directs mo to say that he can cheer- 
fully bear testimony to the fidelity, promptness and intelligence with 
which the late Captain S. A. Mellick of the " N. Y. Mounted Rifles" 



646 On. OF A. D. Mkllick — Capt. Simeon A. Mellick. 

performed his duties, while serving- under the command of the Gen- 
eral at Fortress Monroe; and that ho feels deeply for the affliction of 
the family, while he, at the same time, regrets that the country, in 
this time of dan^jrer, has lost the services of a true man and a gallant 
ofljcer. The writer, while provost-marshal at Norfolk, had the pleas- 
ure to enjoy the society of Captain Mellick almost daily, for the last 
two weeks he was stationed there; and he found in the captain a man 
of a warm, genial heart and a patriot, whose enthusiasm for the good 
cause remained undaunted, even amidst the affliction of sufferings 
from a mortal disease. 

I have the honor to remain. 

Your obedient serv't, 

C. T. Chbistensen, 
Captain and Aide-de-camp. 

Fort Federal Hill,, 
Baltimore, August 16th, 1862. 
* • * • It is with feelings of the deepest regret that we learn of the 
death of our esteemed companion in arras. * » • • Unanimously 
elected to membership in the eighth company (7th Reg't. N. Y. S. 
N. G.) in 1860, he faithfully performed the duties of a soldier while 
with us, and by his gentlemanly bearing and genial manners won the 
esteem of all with whom he came in contact. * • • • We consid- 
ered him one of the best officers sent from our ranks into the volun- 
teer service. « « » • The death of our bi-other awakens with us a 
sterner resolve that the cause to which he is a sacrifice shall ulti- 
mately triumph. 

On behalf of the Eighth Co., 

(Tth Reg't. N. Y. S. N. G.) 

Lieut. G. L. Abbosmith. 

103111. lANDREW D. JUN'R., res. Plainfleld, N. J., b. 23 Oct., 1844; member of the 
N. Y. Bar; served as captain and major on staflf of Gen. J. M. Varian, 
comdg. 3rd Brig., 1st Div., N. G. S. N. Y. from 1872 to 1880; author of 
"The Story of an Old Farm," and the compiler of this genealogy. 

104. III. JAMES BISHOP, b. 9 Dec, 1846, d. at Boselle, N. J., 10 Sept., 1878, after suf- 

fering amputation of left leg, bur. at Greenwood, m. at Rosclle, 
N. J., 3 Apl., 1806, Anna Coles, dau. of Henry W. Smith, of N. 
Y. city, b. 21 Nov., 1845; her res. Orange, N. J.; he was a man of ster- 
ling integrity and of a most elevated character. During his residence 
of 12 years in the city of Elizabeth and at Roselle he was active In 
chui'ch duties and good works, being an officer of the .3rd Presb. 
Church of Elizabeth, and of the Presb. Ch. at Roselle. and from the 
time he attained his majority until his death was continuously a Sun- 
day school superintendent; had 4 ch., I. Caroline Smith, res. Mont- 
clair, N. J. b. 15 Jan., 1867, m. IG Oct., 1889, Francis William Wilcox; 
II. Elizabeth Ayres, b. 5 Jan., 1870, III. Henry Smith, b. 31 Mch., 
1873; IV. Anna, b. 2 Mch., 187.5. 

105. IV. KATHERINE la rue, res. N. Y. city, b. 23 Sept., 1849, m. at Bergen Point, 

N. J., 28 May, 1872. to Lucius Duncan Bulkley, M.D., b. 12 Jan., 1844; 
has6ch., I. Elizabeth Ayres Mellick, b. 17 Mar., 1873; II. Julia, b. 
3 Nov., 1874; III. Lucius Constant, b. 10 May, 1877; IV. Henry Dun- 
can, b. 17 Sept., 1879; V. Katherine La Rue, b. 18 Oct., 1882; VI. Ken- 
neth, b. 20 Dec, 188.5. 

106. V. ELIZABETH AYRES, res. San Angelo, Tom Green Co., Tex., b. 10 Apl., 

1852, m. N. Y. city, by Rev. Dr. John Hall. 12 Oct., 1S81, Joseph Tweedy, 
of PlainHeld, N. J., b. 71 Mch., 1849; has 3 ch., L Lawrence Leslie, b. 
20 Aug., 1882 : II. Andrew Mellick. b. 2 Apl., 1884; III. Joseph Lord, 
b. 21 June, 1880, 

107. VI. HARRIET AUGUSTA, res. Plainfleld, N. J., b. 15 May, 1854, m. at Bergen 

Point, N. J., by Rev. Henry W. F. Jones 4 Feb.. 1873; Rutsen Van 
Rensselaer Schuyler, b. 4 Feb., 1353; has 2 ch., 
I. Van Rensselaer, b. 16 Mch., 1878; II. Sarah Edwards, b. 23, July, 
1879. 
i:)8. VIL MARY ABIGAIL, res. N. Y. city, b. 5 July, 1857. 



Ch. of David Melick, ob' Knox Co., Ohio. 647 

109. VIII. GEOKGE PHELPS, res. Plainfleld, N. J., b. 13 Sept., 186:2, m. at Bergen 

Point, 29 Oct., 1884, Ella, dau. of Justinian Hartley, of B. P., b. 3 June, 
1864; hadSch., 
I. Justinian HABTiiBY, b. 16 Feb., 1887; 
II. Elizabeth, b. Feb., 1889, d. July, 1839. 

FIFTH GENERATION (A). 

David Melick (70) had ch. 

110. I. WILLIAM, b. 1 Dec, 1606, d. in Knox Co., O., in 1879, m, first in 1838, Mina 

Cooper, of Somerset, Perry Co., O., she was killed by lightning-, 5 
June, 1835; by whom 3 ch. ; he m. seconci in Oct., 1833, Sarah, dau. of 
Thomas Beaty, of Knox Co., O., b. 13 Oct., 180S, d. 14 Dec, 1888, by 
whom 10 ch. ; his ch. by first wife, 

I. David C, res. Bladensburg, O., b. 22 Oct., 1829, m. 1853, and has 4 ch., 
\Villia))i, Grace, Walter and another. 

II. Nancy, b. 1831, d. July, 18.57. 

III. Hannah, b. 1S33, m. 1859, a Harrod, and lives at Martensburg, O. 
Of the 10 ph. by second wife but 4 survive, viz. : 

IV. Abraham D., res. Bladensburg, O., b. 23 May, 1837, m. 18 Nov., 1858, 

Minerva J., dau. of William Schooler, of Knox Co., O., b. 29 Jan., 
1833; their 7 ch., Sarah Ann, b. 1859, m. 1880, Albert T. Hall, of Blad- 
ensburg, b. 1857; Alison, b. 1861, d. 1864; Robert E., b. 1863; William 
T., b. 1866, m. 1886, Ollie, dau. of Geo. W. Porterfleld; BecTc E., b. 
1868, Reuben E., b. 1872; Alviii V., b. 1876. 
V. Margaret, res. Bladensburg, O. m. A. J. Hall; 
VI. Jane, m. first, David Earlymine; secona, Samuel Harris. 
VII. Homer Curtis. 

111. II. JOHN WESLEY, b. 27 Sep., 1808, d. 12 Apl., 1870, m. 26 Sep., 1833, Harriet 

Watson, had 9 ch., 
I. Elizabeth, b. 20 Aug., 1834, d. 18 June, 1857. 
II. David R., res. La Fontaine, Ind., b. 33 Nov., 1836. 

III. Thomas, b. 22 Mch., 18.38, d. 30 July, 1863, from wounds received in bat- 

tle; was a member of the 8th Ind. infty. regt. 

IV. Eleanor, b. 18 Feb., 1841, unm. 

V. Sarah, res. Fox, Grant Co., Ind., b. 18 Feb., 1843. 
VI. Cyrus, res, Wabash, Ind., b. 19 July, 1846. 
VII. Eliza, res. Fox, Grant Co., Ind., b. 21 Oct., 1851, unm. 
VIII. William, b. 39 Oct., 1854, d. 19 Jan., 1861. 
XI. Belinda, b. 20 Jan., 185fi, d. 20 Aug., 1863. 

112. ni. TIMOTHY, b. 36 Sep., 1810, dec. 

113. IV. DAVID, b. 16 Sep., 1812, dec, his son David lives at La Fontaine, Grant Co., 

Ind. 

114. V. GEORGE, b. 12 Feb., 1815, d. 1860. 

115. VI. REBECCA, b. 22 July, 1817; dec. 

116. Vn. JOSEPH, res. Bladensburg, O., b. 29 Feb., 1830, m. 33 Feb., 1843, Nancy Young, 

b. 39 Oct., 1325; had 4 ch. 
I. Louisa, b. 17 Dec, 1842, m. William Hall, of Bladensburg. 
II. Naomi, b. 28 Dec, 1844, d. 16 Sep., 1847. 

III. Hannah, b. 30 Jan, 1847; died in infancy. 

IV. Harriet, res. Lincoln, Neb., b. 14 Dec, 1848, m. 25 Dec, 1875, Zacharlah 

Hammel. 

117. Vin. ELIZA, res. Bladensburg, O., b. 17 Feb., 1822, m. 6 Apl., 1841, William Darl- 

ing; their 10 ch., 

I. Lucy A., b. 9 Aug., 1841; II. James K., b. 23 Sep., 184.3, died in Union 
Army; III. David M., b. 18 Sep., 1847; dec; IV. Louisa, b. 6. Aug., 
1850; V. Cyrus, b. July, 1853; VI. Nancy, b. 11 Sep., 1856; VII. Sarah 
Ellen, b. 18 Sep., 1860; VIII. Avilda J; IX. Otto, b. 11 July. 1863; 
X. Lewis, b. 13 Feb., 1869. 

118. IX. MARGARET, res. Richland Center, Wis., b. 13 Aug., 1834, m. a Hankins, 

and has 3 ch. 

119. X. HARRIET, b.3 Mch., 1827, dec, m. Harrison Darling, dec. 

120. XI. MARY ANN, b. 14 Oct., 1829, dec, m. Cyrus Robinson. 

121. XII. MARIA, res. Bladensburg, O., b. 1 Jan., 1833, m. Frank C. Hess. 

122. XIU. SAMUEL, b. 19 Fob., 18.36. 



648 Ch. of Jacob Kline, John Farley, Jacob Neff, Jr. 
sixth generation (a.) 

John, (79) had ch. 

123. I. JACOB, b. 6 May, 1837, unm., res. Canajoharle, N. Y. 

134. II. ELIAS, b. 11 Oct., 1839, ra. Catharine, dau. of Jacob Graft, no ch. 

125. III. NICHOLAS, b. 7 April, 1S41, d. in infancy. 

126. IV. LAWRENCE, b. 14 April, 1843, m. 1 March, 1874, Susan, dau. of Andrew 

Smith; res. Canajoharie, N. Y., have ch., I. Elj ay, b. 5 Jan., 1875; II. 
Chas., b. 26 Aug-., 1876 , d. 1 Feb., 1878; III. Anna E., b. 19 Feb., 1878, d. in 
Infancy; IV. Ella R.,b. 30 April 1879; V. Andrew, b. 19 Feb., 1882; VI. 
Elias, b. X4 Aug., 1887. 

127. V. SARAH, b. 11 June, 1845, d. 26 Sept., 1871, m. 3 Jan., 1866, Chas. Collins; had 

ch., I. Irving, b. 12 April, 1867; n. Roszela, b. 9 Nov., 1868, d. 28 Feb.. 
1869; III. Almeda, b. 29 May, 1870. 

128. VI. MARY M., b. 19 Oct., 1849, d. 7 Dec, 1853, 

129. Vn. CHARLES W., b. 3 Jan., 1856, m. 3 July, 1881, Eliza, dau. of Andrew Smith; 

have ch., I. Henry b. 21 April 1883; II. Chas. Jr., b. 19 Oct., 1884; in. 
Henrietta, b. 28 Sept., 1886. 



JOHAN JACOB KLEIN (Jacob Kline). 

Veronica Gerdrutta Moelich his wife, (A 3.) (Fanny Melick) and their 

descendants. 

1. I. JACOB KLINE, of Readinglon township, Hunterdon Co., N. J., b. in Ger- 

many, 6 Mch., 1714, d. G Jan., 1789, bur. in the Lutheran graveyard at 
New Germantown, N. J., ra. about 1748, Veronica Gerdrutta (A 3) dau. 
of Johannes Moelich (A 1). In connection with his father-in-law, he 
established and carried on in Readinglon tp. a tannery which was 
continued by his descendants for over 75 years. He was a Justice of 
the peace and as early as 1749 a trustee of Zion Lutheran Church at 
New Germantown, N. J. For a description of his residence and other 
incidents of his life, see pp. 76, 82, 91, 95, 178, 238, 554, 603 and 611. 

SECOND GENERATION. 

Jacob Kline (i) had ch. 

2. I. JOHN WILLIAM, bap. Johnnn Willielm, b. 5 Jan., 1750, d. 21 Feb., 1818, on the 

Readington homestead, m. 24 Jan., 1780, Altje (Alche), dau. of Matthias 
Smock, b. 19 Aug., 17G2, d. 23 Dec, 1818; he was a tanner and farmer and 
is bur. in Zion graveyard. For his 2 ch. see p. 649 

3. II. JACOB, b. in 1751, d. 22 Oct., 1823, ra. 7 July, 1782, Phebe, dau. of Peter 

Nevius, of Amwell, N. J., b. in 17GG, d. 18 Feb., 1845. Jacob was a 
farmer and tanner, and settled at New Germantown on what is now 
the Benjatnin Van Doren farm and established a tannery, since car- 
ried on by Jacob Specht. For 37 years he was a ruling officer in Zion 
Lutheran church, for 18 years county freeholder, for raany years a 
justice of the peace, from 1800 to 1H17 town clerk and one of the judges 
of Hunterdon Court, of Common Pleas. For his 11 ch. see p. 649 

4. III. MARY, m. 13 Feb., 177G, John Farley; had at least 4 ch. 

I. jACOii, b. 30 Mch., 1777. 
II. Barbara, b. 13 Feb., 1779. 

III. Mynhard, b. 2G Mch., 1781, 

IV. Aaron, b. 3 Sept., 1789. 

5. IV. MAGDALENE, b. in 1757, d. 16 Mch., 1774. 

6. V. FANNY, m. 20 Dec, 1781, Jacob NeflfJun'r., who d. about 1838; had ch. 

I. Jacob, b. 11 Dec, 1782, d. about 1817, m. Jemima, dau. of George Anson, 
of Rcadington, N. J.; their 4 ch.; 

Ann, b. 1 Feb., isoo, d. 14 Jan.. 1881, m. William P. Todd, of Potters- 
town, and had 4 ch.; 
Fanny, d. in Infancy. 



Ch. of John Wm. and Jacob Kline, H. Van der Veer. 649 

Eliza, h. about 1811, d. about 1875, m. Abraham Ditmars, of Read- 
ington, N. J. ; removed to Ohio, afterwards to Dekalb Co., Ind. ; 
their 7 ch., Frances, Helen, Harriet, Peter, Isaac, Mary and 
Edward. 
Gertrude, d. in infancy. 
II. Fanny G., b. 30 Dec. 1786, d. in 1879-80, unm. 

III. Anna Mary (Polly), b. 17 Sept., 1789, d. 23 Aug-., 1818, m. Abram A. 
Brokaw, of Readin^on, b. 11 Mch., 1790, d. 13 July, 1876; no ch. 

7. VI. AARON, of Drea Hook, N. J., b. 29 Feb., 1760, d. 24 Dec, 1809, m. in 1784, 

Catherine Brokaw, b. 2 Aug-., 1763, d. 18 Dec, 1811; he was atanner; for 
his 8 ch. see p. 652. 

8. VII. PETER, b. 17 Jau., 1771, a tanner and farmer who lived and died on a farm 

adjoining the Readington homestead; he m. Sally Johnson, of Read- 
ington, by whom one ch., I. Peter P., who d. unm. 31 Mch., 1872, 
aged 78. 

THIRD GENERATION. 

John William Kline (2) had ch. 

9. I. GERTRUDE, b. 7 Nov., 1780, d. in Apl., 1864, m. 12 May, 1799, Henry Van der 

Veer, of Amwell, N. J. ; had 6 ch. 
I. John (Rev. and D.D.), b. 5 May, 1800. d. 28 Apl., 1878, m. Maria E., dau. 
of Dr. John Cooper, of Easton, Pa., d. 9 May, 1889. Dr. Van der 
Veer conducted for many years a private classical school at Easton, 
Pa. ; no ch. 
II. Jacob K., of Amwell, N. J., m. first, Sarah Ten Eyck, second, the 
widow of Leonard Kuhl; no. ch. 

III. Peter N., res. Raritan, N. J., m. Jemima, dau. of Jacob Vroom; their 

ch. George, Henry who m. a Kinyon of Raritan, Gitty, Annie and 
Emrna. 

IV. Aletta, m. Christianus Van Doren, of Neshanic, N. J. ; no. ch. 

V. Mary, m. John C. Van Liew, of Neshanic; their 3 ch. Henry V. D., 
John J., and Anna. 
VI. Henry, res. North Branch, N. J., m. Frances C. Blackwell, of Amwell, 
who d. 6 Aug., 1880. 

10. II. JOHN, b. 8 Aug., 1784, d. 20 Jan., 1880, on the homestead farm of his father and 

grandfather, where he spent 83 of his 95 years of life. It is recorded of 
him that he was " a man of exemplary, devoted christian life, genial 
in spirit and abundant in hospitality, of unostentations manners, 
but yet of positive strength of character, who exerted a widespread 
influence for good." It is further recorded that he was regarded in 
later life "the patriarch of the section of country in which he lived 
commanding more than the respect of all who knew him." John 
Kline m. first, 27 Oct., 1804, Catherine Williamson, d. in 1837; ra. second, 
27 Jan., 1841, Eleanor, widow of Henry Vroom, of Wayne Co., O., and 
dau. of Dennis WyckofE, of White House, N. J. ; her present res. Som- 
erville, N. J. ; no ch. 

THIRD GENERATION. 

Jacob Kline (3) had ch. 

11. I. JACOB (Colonel), of Kline's Mills and Trenton, N. J., b. 8 Apl., 1783, 

d. 15 Nov., 1844, m. Lydia, dau. of Tunis Quick, of Readington, b. in 
Mch., 1786, d. 1 Feb., I860, Jacob Kline was a colonel of militia, a mem- 
ber of the legislature, president of a Trenton bank, and in 1836 was 
elected state treasurer; he also owned and operated Kline's grist and 
saw mills on the north branch of the Raritan in Somerset Co. ; for his 
6 ch. see p. 653. 

12. II. PETER, of New Germantown, Kline's Mills, and Laraington, N. J., b. 16 

Jan., 1785, d. 18 Oct., I860, m. Mary, dau. of Ananias Mulford, of New 
Germantown, b. 6 Sep., 1788, d. 15 Nov., 1865; for his 8 ch. see p. 653. 

13. III. FANNY GERTRUDE, of Liberty Corner, N. J., b. 28 Feb., 1787, d. 28 Jan., 

1880, m. 17 Oct., 1807, Isaac Lewis, of Va., a grandson of Rev. Thomas 
Lewis, who was pastor of the Mendham Presb. church, from 1769 until 



650 Ch. of Jacob Kline and Isaac Lewis. 

1778. Isaac Lewis, b. 8 Feb., 1787, d. 1 June, 1855, was a farmer and tan- 
ner; had 7 ch. 
I. Samuel, of Liberty Corner, b. 7 Sep., 1808, d. 21 May, 1877, m. In Oct., 
1835, Eleanor Layton; their ch. Jacob K., res. Mechanicsville, N. 
J., who ra. first, Ann, dau. of Samuel Smith, of Stanton, N. J., ra. 
second, Catherine, dau. of Jacob K. Neflf, of lieadington; Evelyn, 
who m. Anthony Morris, of Liberty Corner, and has no ch. ; Samuel, 
res. Newarli, N. J., m. Marj^aret Irving, and has one son; and 
Isaac, d. 14 Jan., 1873, m. Margaret Irvinjr, no ch. 
n. Phebe, of Liberty Corner, b. in Aug., 1810, d. 10 Feb., 1874, m. Samuel 
Irving; their ch. Isaac, res. Liberty Corner, m. Rachel King and 
has one dau., Minnie; Sarah Jane, m. Garret Freeman, and 
has G ch; Mary Lavinia, m. James McCoUum, of Basking 
Ridge, no ch. ; Abbie, m. Augustus Tapman, of Newark, and has no 
ch.; Eugene J., ofHe-wYevnon, N. J., dec. ra. Ann Hill, one son, 
Charles; i'e<pr, res. New Vernon, m., one son; Ann, m. Swamoick of 
Newark, one son; Phebe and Samuellrving had 3 other children 
who d. young. 

III. Jacob K., of Washington, N. J., b. in 1812, dec, m. Eliza Bellis, of 

Millstone, N. J., their ch., John, res. Plainfleld, N. J., m. twice and 
has onech. : Charles, dec; Alfred A., M. D., res. Morristown, N. J., 
m. Anna B., dau. of Ferdinand Van Doren, of Basking Ridge, and 
has one dau. ; yiio/(20, res. Washington, N. J., m. a Miss Hampton 
of that place, and has one dau. 

IV. Sarah, b. in 18U, m. jlrst, Samuel Cross of Liberty Corner, who d. 10 

Jan., 1867, by whom a dau. Sarah Ann, who m. Daniel Allen of 
Plainfleld, N. J., Sarah Lewis Cross, m. second, David King of 
Liberty Corner, and m. f 7* (rd, Francis Ruuyon of Liberty Corner. 
V. Jane, res. Liberty Corner, b. in 1816, m. Peter A. Layton of Bernards, 
b. 5 Mch., 1811, d. 15 Feb., 1873; their ch., Fanny Elizaheth, b. 24Mch., 
1840, d. 18 Jan., 1864, m. Ayers Codington, of Bound Brook, N. J.; 
Aletta M., b. 8 June, 1840, d. 11 May, 1866, m. George E. Salter, of 
Fairraount, N. J.; John, res, Bernard tp., m. Harriet Hill, and has 
one dau. ; Isaac, of Long Branch, N. J., dec, ra. Esther Drake, and 
had one son, Peter; I'hebe, dec, m. Ayers Codington, no ch. 
VI. Mary, of Plainfleld, N. J., b. in 1818, dec, m. Ayers Leason, dec; their 
ch., Ann, of Bound Brook, N. J., dec, m. a McNabb, and had 3 sons; 
Mary, dec; DatUd, dec; Floretta. 
VII. Isaac V. D., b. in 1820, d. in 1825. 
VIII. Elizabeth, res. Liberty Corner, N. J., b. in 1822, d. 5 Aug. 1889, m. 
John Compton; their ch., Xathaniel, res. Newark, m. Josephine 
Clark, and has two ch. : Isaac L., M. D., res. Bound Brook, m. 
Caroline Arrowsmith, no ch. ; Elizabeth Lewis Compton had 2 other 
ch. who d. young. 
IX. Charles, b. in 1824, d. in 1838. 

X. Catherine A., of Liberty Corner, b. 5 Sep., 1828. 
XL Anna Frances, b. in 1831, d in 18.3:3. 

14. IV. JOHN WILLIAM, of New Germantown, Flemington, etc, b. 28 Dec, 1788, 

d. 17 Sep., 1847, m. Sarah, dau. of Thomas Williams, of New German- 
town, b. 15 Mch., 1795, d. 7 Oct., 1817, had 6 ch., 

I. William Barnet, of Jersey City, b. in 1818, d. 15 Aug., 1881, unm. 

II. John F. M., b. 14 Aug., 1821, drowned in the South Branch, 27 Aug., 
1827. 

III. Lewis A., of Jersey City, b. in 1824, d. 30 May, 1888. 

IV. Mary E., res. New Germantown. 

V. Harriet A. H., res. New Germantown. 

VI. Sarah, res. New Germantown, m. James H. Sayre, of Elizabeth, N. J., 
no ch. 

15. V. MARIA (POLLY), b. 17 Apl., 1791, d. 15 Jan., 1869, m. Richard I. Field, of 

Bound Brook, N. J., b. 12 Sep., 1785, d. 6 May, 1871, had 11 ch., 
I. Jeremiah H., b. KiDec, 1809, d. 2 Feb., 18.56, m. 15 Mch., lasa, Margaret W. 
dau. of John Telfair, of New York, b. 26 Dec, 1817; her res. Chicago. 
111. ; their n cli., John Telfair, b. 8 Dec, 1838, m. in 1868 Mary A., dau. 
of Nathaiithicl Childs, of St. Louis, Mo., res. 204.'; Blendon place, St. 
Louis; JiUhiird I., b. 25 Nov., 1841, m. in lH(i5, Mary E., dau. of Benj, 
Carpenter of Chicago, 111., res. 250 Dearborn avenue, Chicago; 



Ch. of Jacoh Klixe and Riciiaijd J. Field. 651 

Maraaret »r., b. 27 May, 18-J9, m. in 1873, Isaac Newton Maynard, b. 
6 May, 1849, res. 284 Genessee St., Utica, N. Y. 
II. Phebe Maria, b. IS Nov., I8il, d. 8 Mch., 1889. m. 13 June, 1833, Henry 
Cornell Brokaw, of Bound Brook, N. J., b. 2 Oct., 1809, d. 29 Nov., 
1872; their 6 ch., Mary Jane,h. 9 Apl., 18;i4, m. in 1853, Abraham 
Smalley, who d. In 1881; res. Bound Brook, N. J.; Elizabeth SmocK 
b. 27 Oct., 1835, m. in 1854 George Macdonald; res. New Brunswick, 
N. J.; Catherine Van Xest, b. 13 Mch., 1839, m. in 1873 Alexander 
Manning; res. New Market, N. J.; Rachael D., b. 13 Oct., 1841, m. in 
1879' Bevd. A. E. Baldwin, who d. in 1886; res. New Brunswick, N. 
J. ; Richard //., b. 5 Feb., 1848, m. in 1880 Estelle P., dau. of Jacob 
Shurts; res. Bound Brook; Isaac Xewton, b. 2 Jan., 1850, unm. ; rea 
Bound Brook. 

III. Jacob K., res. Bound Brook, b. 31 Jan., 1814, m. 5 Sep., 1843, Rebecca 

6., dau. of Henry Stewart, of Carlisle, Ind., b. 9 Feb., 1816; their 4 
ch. 

Richard L, b. in 1844, d. in 1847; Mary Elizabeth, b. 25 July, 1846. 
Henry S., b. in 1855, d. in 1857. William B., b. in 1.57, d. in 1859. 

IV. Jane, b. 16 Mch., 1816, d. 16 Dec, 1857, m. 22 Nov., 1838, Henrj' H. Garret- 

son, b. 20 May, 1810. 
V. Richard R., res. Plainfleld, N. J., b. 8 Mch., 1818, m. 27 Feb., 1845, his 
cousin Marg-aretta (18) dau. of Jacob B. Miller, of Morris Co., N. J., 
b. 21 July, 1823, d. 25 Nov., 1877; had 5 ch., Albert Miller, b. 8 Jan., 
1846; Richard S pencer, h. S J&n., 18iS; Chauncey Mitchell, h. 21 Mch., 
18.50, a prominent physician and surgeon at Plainfleld, N. J.; Jacob 
Ogden, b. 28 Nov., 1851; Mary Florence, b. 8 June, 1856, dec. 

VI. Benjamin M., res. Bound Brook, b. l May, 1820, m. 22 July, 1851, Helen 

M., dau. of John D. Field, of Bound Brook, b. 13 Jan., 1831; their 4 
ch. 

Anna Eliza, b. 2 July, 1852, m. 22 Nov., 1882, William F. Metlar, res. 

Ross Hall, Raritan Landing (New Brunswick), N. J., John D., b. in 

18.54, d. in infancy. Amy K., b. 20 Sep., 1858, m. in 1880 Dennis Field 

Vermeule, of New Brunswick. Ada A., b. 13 Feb., 1863, m. in 

1888, Walter WoUsey, D. D. S., res. Bound Brook. 

VII. Rachel D., b. 5 June, 1823, d. 12 May, 1871, m. in 1847 James Polhemus 

VIII. John K., res. Bound Brook, b. 27 Dec, 1825, m. 6 May, 1850, Lucinda, 

dau. of John Whitehill, of St. Louis, Mo., b. 14 June, 1828; their 

dau. Laura W., b. 7 July, 1755, m. in 1875 Charles W. Auten, of New 

Brunswick, who is dec. 

IX. Isaac N., res. N. Y. city, b. 4 May, 1828, m. 15, June, 1870, Mary, dau. of 

Rev. Jacob C. Dutcher, b. 28 Feb., 1848, no ch. 
X. Peter, res. Plainfleld, N. J., b. 17 Nov., 1830, m. 3 June, 1863, Helen C, 
dau. of Chauncey N. Shipman, b. 3 July. 1839, their 2 ch. Helen S., 
b. in 1868, d. in 1874. Edward Herriclc, b. 3 July, 1871. 
XL William B., res. 415 N. 7th St., St. Louis, Mo., b. 16 Sep., 1834, m. 17 
June, 1874, Harriet E., dau. of George M. Boyd, of Atglen, Chester 
Co.. Pa., b. 23 Jan., 1848; their 2 ch., Helen Mary,b. s May, 1875, Park 
Boyd, b. in 1876, d. in 1888. 

16. VI. ANN, b. 19 Mch., 179.3, d. 20 Feb., 1795. 

17. VII. PHEBE, b. 19 Dec, 1796, d. 10 Mch., 1874, m. Joseph Bartles of New German- 

town, b. 25 Dec, 1784, d. 10 Mch., 1865; had 2 ch. 
I. George Harvey, res. Flemington, N. J., m. Lois, dau. of Austin 
Clark, of Lebanon, N. J. ; their 3 ch., Joseph, Austin and Ella. 
II. Jacob K., res. New Germantown. 
18. VIII. ELIZABETH, b. 1 Aug., 1799, d. 25 Mch., 1880, m. Jacob B. Miller, of New 
Germantown, had 9 ch. 

I. Margaretta, b. 21 July, 1823, d. 25 Nov., 1877, m. 27 Feb., 1845, her 

cousin Richard R. Field (15), b. 8 Mch., 1818. 

II. Henry, who ra. a Beardslee. 

III. Jacob, res. Scranton, Pa., m. a DeBentlye. 

IV. Elizabeth, d. in infancy. 

V. William, res. Flanders, N. J. 

IV. Elizabeth, res. Newark, N. J., m. George Roe, of Hackettstown, 
who d. in 1888, and has 5 ch. 

VII. and VIII. Clark and Wesley, twins, d. in infancy. 



652 Ch. of a. Dunham, B. Van Doren, Aaron Kline. 

19. IX. NELLY STOOTOPF, b. i July, 1801, d. 23 Apl., 1803. 

20. X. CATHARINE, b. 20 July, 180*. d. 18 Jan., 1857, m. in 1824, Aaron Dun- 

ham, of Clinton, N. J., who d. 14 Aug., 1883; had 8 ch., viz: 
I. Mary C, d. in Aug., 186.3, m. James Stryker, d. in July, 1851; tteir 2 ch- 
Catherine T., res. Mt. Pleasant, N. J., who m. Georgre Pickel, and 
has 5 ch. ; Eliza, res. Clinton, who m. Isaac Creveling', and has one 
dau. 
II. Phebe Elizabeth, b. 12. Jan., 1829, m. 8 Oct., 1856 Edwin Mellck (C. 30), 
res. Clintjn, N. J., b. 20 Sep., 1824; has one son, Aaron DiinTi/im, b. 
31 Aug., 1851, m. 5 June, 1880, Estelle. dau. of Revd. T. A. Jacobus, 
of the N. J. M. E. Conference. 

III. Whitfield, res. Clinton, N. J., m. Christiana Carhart; has 4 ch., viz: 

^fary Elizabeth, Charles C, Katherine A'., and Atm who m. B. 
Dunham. 

IV. Jacob, b. in Feb. 1857. 

v. Frances Aletta, m. James R. Cline, res. Clinton; no ch. 
"VI. Margaretta M. 

Vn. James, of Salisbury, N. C, d. 14 Apl., 1889, m. Christiana, dau. of Wil 

liam Hoffman, of Annandale, N. J.; had 9 ch., viz; .Sally E., Mary 

Louise, Phebe Estelle, Aaron, William H., Florence, L'dwin IS., 

Lorena, and an infant, dec. 

VIII. Nehemiah, res. Salisbury, N. C, m. Fanny F. Conner, of that place. 

21. XI. ALETTA, of New Germaatown, b. 17 Feb., 1808, d. 9 Jan., 1879, m. Benjamin 

Van Doven, of Middlebush, N. J., b. 17 June, 1798, d. 13 Apl., 1872; had 5 

ch., viz. : 

I. Dinah H., res. New Germantown, m. Jacob R. Fisher, of Bedminster; 

their 3 ch. Anna F., m. Simon Hag'eman, of Bedminster, and has 2 

sons; IT/nia?)! P., res. New Germantown, m. Prances D., dau. of 

John P. S. Miller; Benjamin V. D., res. Jersey City. 

II. Phebe, b. 8 Apl., 1873, m. William Demun, of Bedminster, and left one 

dau. Aletta. 
III. Ann Eliza Miller, b. 17 Dec, 1830, m. 13 Nov., 18.56, Smith English 
Hedg-es, M. D., of Chester, N. J., b. 20 Nov., 18W; their 3 ch.; Ellis 
Walton, a well-known physician, of Plainfield, N. J., Benjamin 
Van Doren, of Chester, and Jane Enrjlish. 
IV. BEN.1AMIN, res. New Germantowii, ra. Emma L., dau. of John P. S. 

Miller, and has 2 ch, Benjamin and John. 
V. Catherine D., of Jersey City, b. l Apl., 1836, d. 14 Apl., 1875, m. Max- 
well Abernethy, of Warren Co., N. J., and left one dau. Aletta. 

22. XII. DAVID (Revd), b. 14 Nov., 1812, d. 5. Nov., 1877, while pastor of the Luth- 

eran Church, at Spruce Run, Hunterdon Co., N. J., m. 18 Apl., 1833, 
Jane, dau. of John Kirkpatrick, of I-iberty Corner, N. J., b. 19 June, 
1814. For his 12 ch. See p. 654. 

THIRD GENERATION. 

Aaron Kline (7) had ch. 

23. I. FANNY G., bap. " Fronica Gertraut" b. 29 Oct., 178-.. d. in infancy. 

24. II. JANE, bap. " Jannetze " b. 16 Apl., 1787, dec. m. Henry Wyckoff, of Reading- 

ton, and removed to Dayton, Ohio; had 7 ch., viz; 
I. Mary Ann. 
II. Catharine. 

III. Jane. 

IV. Nicholas, of California. 

V. Henry, who was killed by the Indians in one of the territoriea 
VI. Henrietta. 
VII. Jacob, of California. 

25. III. PETER A., was a tanner and farmer who lived at the " Head of Brookye," 

near Stanton, Hunterdon Co., and at the close of his life, at White 
House, same co., b. 27 Sept., 1789, d. in Sept., 1858, m. first, Mary, dau. of 
Cornelius Bowman, b. 15 Nov., 1795, d. 8 Feb., 1824, by whom 6 ch. ; m. 
second, Rebecca, dau. of John Smith, of Stanton, by whom 9 ch. ; for 
hisis ch. see p. 655. 

26. IV. JOHN JACOB, a tanner at Drea Hook, in Hunterdon Co., b. 17 A^igr., 1791, 

d. 23 Aug., 1849, m. 27 Nov., 1814, first, Eva, dau. of Andrew Kinney, b. 



Ch. of D. Gerhardt, p. G. Schomp, Col. Jacob Kline. 653 

24 Nov., 1797, d. 6 Mar., 1824, by whom 5 ch. ; m. second, Mary Brewer, 
widow of Elias Stout, b. 18 Mar., 1805, d. 31 Dec, 1871, by whom 2 ch. ; 
for his 8 ch. see p. 655. 
27. V. AARON, of N. Y. City, b. 4 Aug., 1794, d. in July, 1852, unra. 
38. VI. ELIZABETH, b. 11 Mar., 1797, d. in 1836 in Carroll Co., Ohio, to which place 
she had just removed with her husband and family; m. David Ger- 
hardt, of Round Valley, N. J. ; had ch. 
I. Catherine Ann, res. Freuchtown, N. J., m. Henry Demott, of Stan- 
ton, and has ch. 
II. Jacob, res. Washington Co., Ohio, m. Mary Moreland, and has ch. 

III. Ellen, res. Indianapolis, Ind., m. Abraham Ball, of Ohio, and has ch. 

IV. George, res. New Germantown, m. Catherine Ann, dau. of Harmon 

Reger, of N. G., b. 11 Feb., 1818, d. 26 Oct., 1855, no ch. 
V. Aaron, res. Indiana, m. a Hardesty, of Malvern, O., and has ch. 
VI. Nathan, of Wilmington, Del., dec, m. twice, his first wife, a dau. of 

Rev. Richard Collier, of Spruce Run, N. J., and has ch. 
VII. Godfrey, who d. unm. in Indiana. 

VIII. Sarah, of Indiana, dec. m. Charles Whittaker, and had 2 ch. 
IX. Rebecca, res. Canton, O., m. James R. Steen, and has ch. 
X. David H., res. Nebraska, m. a Reeder, and has ch. 

29. VII. MARY, b. 8 Jan., 1800, d. 24 Mar., 1824, unm. 

30. VIII. CATHERINE, of Branchburg, N. J., b. 6 Sept., 1802, d. 12 Mar., 1864, m. in 

1821, Peter G. Schomp, of Readington, b. 28 Aug., 1801, d. 8 May, 1886; 
had 5 ch. 
I. George, res. North Branch, N. J., m. Amy Ann Swift, of Williamburg. 

L. I. ; their 4 ch., Georye C, Peter A., Catherine B., and Amy A. 
II. Catherine Ann, b. 29 ApL, 1824, d. 14 Jan., 1S80, m. John Sutphen, 
b. in Aug., 1819, d. 25 Sep., 1884; their ch. George, b. in 1847, d. in 
1866 ; John and Peter dec. 

III. Elizabeth, b. 5 Nov., 1827, d. 3 May, 1863, m. William B. Wyckoff, of 

Branchburg; their one ch., Dennis, b. in 1853, d. in 1866. 

IV. Caroline, m. Abraham H. Lane, of Branchburg, their one ch. John, 

m. Mary, dau. of John Van Pelt, of North Branch, and has one ch. 
V. John, b. in 1841, d. in 1846. 

FOURTH GENERATION. 

Colonel Jacob Kline (ii) had ch. 

31. I. ALETTA, of Bedminster, d. 10 Mch., 1875, m. Gabriel Van Dervoort, of Burnt 

Mills, Somerset Co., N. J., d. in Aug., 1877; had ch., 
I. Jacob, res. Bedminster, m. Gertrude Davis, of Bound Brook, and has 
4ch. 
II. John, res. White House, m. Mary Elizabeth Feeter, of W. H., and has 

2ch. 
III. Lydia K., m. in 1888, John H. Kenyon, of Plainfield. 

32. n. PETER NEVIUS, b. 21 Nov. 1817. d. 19 Feb., 1837. 

33. III. ELLEN V., b. 17 Nov., 1819, d. in infancy. 

34. IV. TUNIS Q., res. Kline's Mills (Pluckamln), b. 29 Feb., 1822, unm. 

35. V. JACOB, res. Kline's Mills, m. Mary Burr, of Philadelphia, had ch. 

.1 Jacob, res. Somerville, N. J., m. Bessie, dau. of Abraham Van Arsdale, 
Pluckamln, and has ch. 
II. Bessie. 

III. Orion, res. Owego, N. Y., ra. 

IV. Eric. 

V. Theodore, res. N. Y. city, m. 

36. VI. PHEBE, of Kline's Mills, d. 6 Mch., 1889. 

FOURTH GENERATION 

Peter Kline (12) had ch. 

37. I. JACOB P., of Jersey City, N. J., b. 3 Oct., 1812, d. in 1864, m. Catherine, dau. of 

Jeremiah Conover, of Pluckamln; had 6 ch. 
I. Maria O., II. Peter N., III. Elizabeth W., IV. M.^rgaretta M., V. 
Lewis A., VI. Kate F. 



654 Ch. of Peter & Rev. David Kline, J. F. Dumont. 

38. II. A. MULFORD, dec., m. flrst a dau. of Frazer Baldwin, of Bernards, Somerset 

Co., by whom 2 ch. Eugene and MARY;m. second in Illinois, and had 
one dau. who is m. and lives at Alton, 111.; m. a third time, no ch. by 
last wife. 

39. III. J. W. HARRISON, removed to California, and has not been heard from 

since 1858. 

40. IV. MARY LAVINIA, b. in 1821, d. 16 June, 1849, m. Peter J. Lane, of Bedmlns- 

ter; had 3ch. 
I. Susan, res. Bound Brook, N. J., ra. H. Kline Ramsey, and has one 
son. 

II. Job, res. Morristown, N. J., who m. a Keats, and has ch. 

III. Mary, res. Calif on, N. J., m. John R. Clark, of New Germantown, 
has 2 ch., Fanny and Florence. 

41. V. PHEBE ELIZABTH, unm. 

42. VI. MARTIN NEVIUS, res. N. Y. city, m. Elizabeth Howell, of Walton, N. Y., 

and has 2 ch., I. Mary. II. Nellie. 

43. vn. FRANCES L., b. 4 Jan., 1828, d. 8 Apl., 1860, m. Peter J. Lane, of Bedminster, 

no ch. 

44. VIII. PETER L., res. North Branch, N. J., m. in 1872, Jane E. dau. of Samuel B. 

Little, of North Branch, and has 7 ch., I. Mary L., II. Lizzie W., III. 
S. Walter, IV. Robert R., V. James E., VI. Frederick, M., VII. 
Eloise. 

FOURTH GENERATION. 

Rev. David Kline (22) had ch. 

45. I. ANNE ELIZA, res. Phillipsbur^, N. J., b. 23 May, 1835, m. 26 Oct., 1853, John 

F. Dumont, b. 11 Nov., 1824, d. 8 May, 1889; had 13 ch., 
I. Ira, res. Ringwood. N. J., b. 27 Sep., 1855, m. 10 May, 1882, Katherine R. 
Skellinger, of Flanders, N. J., b. 3 Aug., 1855; their 2 ch., Myra 
George, b. 1884; Edward George, b. 1886. II. William L., b. 6 Apl., 
1857. III. Charles, b. 20 Dec, 1858, d. 3 Apl., 1859. IV. Laura, b. 3 
May, I860. V. Grace, b. 8 July, 1862, d. 27 Jan., 1882. VI. Jenny, b. 
5 Sep., 1864. VII. Anne Eliza, b. 9 Apl., 1867. VIII. Frederick 
T. F., b. 7 Mch., 18G9. IX. Wayne, b. 14 Apl., 1871. X. Infant, b. 
and d. 1873. XI. Madge T.; b. 30 July, 1875, d. 21 July, 1876. XII. 
Victor St. Claire, b. 12 Sep., 1877. XIII. Ethel, b. 6 May, 1879. 
4«. II. PHEBE, b. 3 Dec, 1836, d. 28 May, 1857. 

47. III. PETER, res. South Orange, N. J., b. 9 Feb., 1838, unm. 

48. IV. JOHN CASSADAY, res. Glen Gardner, N. J., b. 25 Nov., 18.39, unm. 

49. V. JACOB, res. Eatontown. N. J., b. 27 Apl., 1842, m. 20 May, 1875, Anna E., dau. 

of George D. Cook, of E., b. 23 Jan., 1853; has 5 ch., 
I. Violet, b. 29 May, 1876, d. in infancy. 
IL David B., b. 15 Aug., 1877. 

III. Herbert W., b. 10 June, 1879. 

IV. Jessie A., b. (i Sep., 1882. 
V. William N., b. 8 Feb.. 1885. 

50. VI. FRANCES MILLER, res. Bergen Point, N. J., b. 12 Dec, 184.3. 

61. VII. ELLEN TAYLOR, res. South Orange, N. J., b. 29 Mch., 1845. m. 5 Dec, 1867, 

Andrew D. Hutchinson; has 1 ch. 
52. VIII. MARY M. P.. res. Glen Gardner, b. 5 Dec. 1846, m. 5 Dec, 1867, Maurice 

M. Fritz, b. 6 June, 1834, d. 8 June, 1870; has 2 ch., 
I. Louise Pohlman, b. 11 Aug.. 1869, II. Leslie Dumont, b. 22 Mch., 1874. 
5.3. IX. WILLIAM HARRISON, res. 34 E. 14th St., N. Y. city, b. 2C Feb., 1849, m. 11 

Sept., 1888, Lillian D. S. Davis; no ch. 
54. X. ALFRED BEAUMONT, res. N. Y. city, b. 1 Apl.. 1851, unm. 
.55. XI. JANE MUSIER, res. 10 Lowell St.. Lawrence, Mass., b. 10 Mch., 1853, m. 34 

Jan., 18K0, George H. Adams, b. 24 Oct., 1850; has one ch., 
I. Mary K., b. 8 Jan., 1885. 
56. XII. ALICE, res. Glen Gardner, b. 27 Mch., 1*55. 



Ch. ob^ Peter A., John S., J. J. Kline, David Davis. 655 

FOURTH GENERATION. 
Peter A. Kline (25), had ch. by first wife. 

57. I. CATHERINE, of Readington tp., Hunt. Co., N. J., b. 12 Feb., 1813, d. 10 Jan. , 

1879, m. Peter S. Swaekhamer, b. July, 1813, d. 10 Aug-,, 1876; had 5 ch. 
I. John R., m. Margaret, daii. of Thomas J. Stires, of 111.; has 2 ch. Peter 
L. and Davta. II. Peter K., m. Mary Ann, dau. of Mahlon Cark- 
hufif, of Readington; has 3 ch. Jenny, Mary and Elln. III. Mary 
Jane, res. White House, N. J. IV. David, b. 22 Oct., 1845, d. 26 Feb., 
1877. V. Anna C, res. White House, N. J. 

58. II. MARY, res. Somerville, N. J., m. John J. Voorhees; no ch. 

59. III. AARON P., m. Susan Church, of Coun.; one ch. J/ar?/. 

60. IV. PETER, of the " Head of Brookye," near Stanton, N. J., b. In Oct., 1817, d. 

12 May, 1889, m. Laney, dau. of David D. Scborap, of Readington; had 
one ch. Mary Elizabeth, who m. Gabriel L. Gulick, and has 7 ch. 

61. V. ELIZABETH, of Centerville, N. J., b. 3 Sept., 1820, d. 14 Aug., 1886, m. Lewis 

F. R. Ball, b. 8 Mch., 1821, d. 25 Aug., 1886; had i ch. 
I. Harriet, II. Catherine L., III. Rebecca, IV. Stephen. 

62. VI. CORNELIUS B., res. Mechanicsville, N. J., ui. Catherine AUeger, of Read- 

ington ; has one ch. Lambert. 

Peter A. Kline (25) had ch. by second wife. 

63. VII. FANNY, dec, m. Josiah Cole, of Pleasant Run, N. J. ; no ch. 

64. VIII. JOHN S., res. Flemington, N. J., m.Jtrst, Sarah, dau. of Jacob Q. Cark- 

huff, of Pleasant Run, d. in 1865, by whom 7 ch. 
I. John W., res. Flemington, m. Laney, dau. of Aaron Thompson, of 

Pleasant Run, has 2 ch, Aaron T. and Sophia Maria. 
II. Jacob Q., res. Flemington, b. in 1853, m. Annie E., dau. of David D. 
Schomp, of Pleasant Run. 

III. William S., res. Flemington, m. Bell, dau. of James Housel. 

IV. Peter S., res. Kansas. 

V. Amanda, res. Flemington, m. John Ott. 

VI. Levi C, res. Plainfield, N. J., m. Laura, dau. of John K. Dalley. 
Vn. EzEKiEL, res. Pleasant Run. b. in 1865, m. Laura Smith, 

John S. Kline, m. .second, Sarah Tunison, by whom 9 ch. 
VIII. Annie, IX. Jenny, X. Louisa, XI. Henry, XII., XIIL, XIV. tri- 
plets who d. soon after birth, XV. George, XVI. Isabel. 

65. IX. ANN. res. Elizabeth, N. J., unm. 

66. X. DAVID, m. Mary C. Smith, dec. by whom one living dau. Mary, who m. 

A. Brown. 

67. XI. ANDREW, served in the Union army, War of Rebellion, and moved west. 

68. XII. ABBIE, b. 2 Feb., 1839. d. 9 Mch., 1884, m, flr.st, Frank Cornell, of White 

House, N. J., by whom one son William, m. second, Willliam B. Vllet, 
of Lamington, N. J., by whom 3 ch. Alvah C. and Joseph H., twins, 
and George P. 

69. XIIL MARTIN S., res. White House, served in Union army. War of Rebellion, 

m. 26 Oct., 1872, Almira Haver, of Round Valley; has one living child, 
Maggie. 

70. XIV. WILLIAM S.. res. Oregon, m. and has 3 dau. 

71. XV. SUSAN, res. St. Paul, Minn., m. John Kitchen, of Rarltan, N. J.; has 2 

ch. Robert and Minnie. 

FOURTH GENERATION. 

John Jacob Kline (26) had ch. 

72. I. CATHERINE ANN, of Drea Hook. N. J., b. 17 Aug., 1815, d. 12 Nov., 1871, m. 

David Davis, b. in Oct., 1814, d. 23 Feb., 1887; had ch. 
I. John, res. Drea Hook, m. Catherine M., dau. of Daniel Dllts, of Read- 
ington, and has G ch. George, Rev., Pastor of Ref. Chuch of Pea- 
pack, N. J., who m. Fanny Johnston, of Washington, N. J., and 
has one ch. Frances; Jacob, res. Annandale, N. J.; David, M. D., 
res. New Brunswick, N. J.; JoJin Milton, res. Newark, N. J.; 
Bergen, and Charles Hoinard. 



656 Ch. of John Jacob Kline — Simon HiiMrod. 

II. Sarah Elizabeth, b. 14 Mch., 1841, d. 27 Apl., 1861. 
III. Eveline, res. Trenton, N. J., m. John Van Fleet, of Beadlngton, N. J. , 
has 3 ch. ; Mary, Laura, and Oscar. 
78. II. ELIZA, b. 14 Feb., 1817, d. 1 June, 1867, m. Isaac Dalley. of Branchburgr, 
Somerset Co., and removed to the West; had ch. I. Jacob, res. Scran- 
ton, Pa. II. Peter, res. Belvidere, N. J. III. David. IV. Mary. V. 
Jane. 

74. III. JOHN J., of Belvidere, N. J., b. 7 Mch., 1819, d. IB July, 1887, m. 31 May, 1845, 

Eliza A., dau. of William Cramer, of White House, N. J., b. 7 May, 
1821, d. 11 Apl.. 1885; had 3 ch., 
I. John J., b. 19 Aug.. 1850, d. 27 July, 1877, m. a Maffit, of Bristol, Ind. ; 
had one son, Kenneth. 
II. Laura, m. Edward Prall, of New Hampton, N. J., and has 2 ch. 
III. Ella, res. Kahway, N. J., m. John Flomerfelt, of Bedminster, N. J., 
and has one ch. 

75. IV. ANDREW K., res. Bristol. Elkhart Co., Ind., b. 5 Feb., 1821, m. flrst, 5 June, 

1851, Sarah Ann Knapp, b. In 1830, d. in 1874, by whom no ch. ; m. secona, 
20 May, 1877, Harriet Sullivan, of Bristol, b. 6 Jan., 1858, by whom 3 ch. 
L Mary Alice, b.5 Apl., 1878. 
n. Charles A., b. 27 Dec, 1881. 

III. Bertha J., b. 16 Nov.. 1884. 

76. V. PETEK K.. of Branchburg, N. J., b. 22 Dec.. 1822, d. 11 Apl., 1886, m. Mary, 

dau. of William Cramer, of White House; had ch. 
I. Kate C, of Somerville, dec. m. J. W. Garhart, of White House; their 
i ch., Cora, Albert, Mary and anotlier. 
II. John J., res. Somerville, m. Truth A., dau. of Peter I. Voorhees, of 

Readingrton, N. J.; has one ch. Voorhees. 
in. Mary Eva. 

IV. Andrew K.. M. D., Princeton. N. J. 
V. Ella, b. 18 May, 1802, d. 13 Feb., 1882. 

VI. Lilly. 
VII. Hattie. 

77. VI. AARON K.. of Bloomington, N. J., b. 24 Aug.. 1840. m. 27 Nov.. 1862, Har- 

riet, dau. of David O. Cole, of Readington. N. J., b. 7 Mch., 1840, d. 28 
Aug.. 1874; has2ch. 
I. George W.. b. 5 Jan., 1864; a graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy, 
and is an ensign in the U. S. N. 

78. VII. DAVID D., res. Stanton, N. J., b. 1 Apl,, 1842, m. 11 Sep., 1862, Sarah 

Catherine, dau. of Jacob Sheets, of Stanton, b. 9 Dec, 1845; had one 
ch., Ida. b. 17 Oct., 1863, d. in infancy. 



SIMON LUDEWIG HIMROTH, (Simon Himrod). 

Marie Catherine Moelich his wife, (A 7.) (^Maria Melick) and their 

descendants. 
1. I. SIMON HIMBOD, b. in 1731 at Beudorf. Germany, bap. at the Evangelical 
Head-Church by Pastor Joh. Georg Schmidt, the certificate reading:— 
'• The 16th of December, 1731, to Master Wilhelm Himroth a miller of 
this place, Bendorf, a son has been baptized; witnesses were Simon 
Ludewig Riickart, a citizen and fruit-dealer of this place, Veronica 
Gerdrutta, wife of Master Georg Peter Otto, a citizen of this place, 
and has been given to the child the name Simon Ludewig. God bless 
the baptized for Jesus' sake. Amen." His father was a seigneurial 
miller, and the family evidenlly was in close relation to the Moelichs 
as we sec that Veronica Gerdrutta Otto, Mariah Katrina's sister, 
stood godmother to the son. The name is not uncommon in Rhenish, 
Prussia, there being an Abbey Himrod, in ruins, si.xty miles from Ben- 
dorf and thirty from Tr&ves in the county of Witlich. Simon on 
attaining majority emigrated to America, landing at Philadelphia. 15 
Sept.. 1752. from the "Ship Two Brothers, commanded by Thomas 
Arnott. from Rotterdam, last from Cowes." On registering with the 



Children of Simox Hlmrod. 657 

secretary of the province he sig-ned his full name, but later abandoned 
the use of Ludewig-. He joined the family of Johannes Moelich (A) at 
Bedminster, N. J., and under him and his son Aaron learned the trade 
of tanner and currier. Simon m. Johannes' dau. Marie Cathrine 
(A 7), and continued living at Bedminster until 1772 when he removed 
to Milton, Northumberland Co., Pa. He suffered much from incur- 
sions of Indians and tories in 1779, and it is said that at the capitula- 
tion of Fort Freeland on Warriors' Ruu he and his two eldest sons 
were made prisoners, taken to Canada and there detained for some 
time. His wife and young-er children probably returned to New Jer- 
sey, remaining for a few years. Simon was a member of the Pa. leg-is- 
lature from 1781 to 1785. (See pp. 277, 278, 279). 

SECOND GENERATION. 

Simon Himrod (i) had 7 ch. 

2. I. AARON, b. 18 Aug-., 1757, at Bedminster, N. J., d. 4 Dec, 1820, at Waterford, 

Erie Co., Pa. ; m. 14 ApL, 1789, Isabella, dau. of Moses Kirk, of North- 
umberland Co., Pa., b. 25 Sept., 1760, d. 22 Apl., 1841. After marriage 
Aaron settled on the shore of Cayuga Lake but was driven off by the 
Indians. His name is said to be preserved in that vicinity by Himrod's 
Point, opposite Trumausburg. For a time he owned and occupied a 
farm in Turbut tp., Northumberland Co., Pa., now the property of 
Mrs. Sylvia Cronrath. About 1798 he removed to Waterford tp., Erie 
Co., Pa., settling permanently on a farm now owned and occupied by 
his granddaughter, Mrs. Adeline Boyd. For his 13 ch. see p. 658. 

3. II. CATHERINE, b. at Bedminster, N. J., 2 Oct., 1760, d. in Crawford Co., Pa., 21 

June, 1829, bur. in Long Stand graveyard near Meadville, m. John 
Ryan, of Northumberland Co., Pa., who d. 10 Feb., 1830. He removed 
to Crawford Co., Pa., in 1798, having two years before taken up 200 
acres of land about 7 miles from Meadville, the house he then erected 
being now occupied by his grandson, Major George P. Ryan. For his 9 
ch. see p. 659. 

4. III. ANDREW, b. 1762, at Bedminster, N. J., d. Del. Co., O., m. Catherine, dau. 

of Moses Kirk, of Turbut tp., Northumberland Co., Pa., who d. 1832. 
Andrew moved from Pa. to Ohio about 1820. For his 7 ch. see p. 601, 

5. IV. MARTHA, b. at Bedminster, N. J., 12 Oct., 1764, d. 10 Aug., 1806, at Milton, 

Northumb. Co., Pa., m. 1 Jan., 1788, Bethuel Vincent, of Milton, b. 3 
June, 1702, d. 1 May, 1837, the great grandson of Levi Vincent, a Hug- 
uenot who emigrated from France to N. J. Bethuel Vincent was dis- 
tinguished in his vicinity for the force and integrity of his character, 
his retentive memory and clear intellect, together with a robust and 
vigorous frame. He was postmaster at Milton for many years. When 
a boy, in July, 1779, at the capitulation of Freeland's Fort to the Brit- 
ish Colonel McDonald, he, together with his father Cornelius Vincent, 
his brother Daniel and a number of neighbors, including the Him- 
rods, was captured. The prisoners were taken to Canada and there 
detained until the end of the war. For her 9 ch. see p. 662. 

6. V. WILLIAM, b. at Bedminster, N. J., 1766, d. 8 Feb.. 1813, at Ovid. N. Y., m 

Elizabeth Sutphen, dau. of Peter Sutphen, of Somerset Co., N. J., b. 
1766, d. 19 Nov., 1849, at Trumansburg, N. Y. He learned the trade of 
tanner and currier from his Uncle Aaron Malick (A 2), and in 1796 set- 
tled on a farm at Lodi, Seneca Co., N. Y., where he established a 
tannery. Ten years later he exchanged this property for 320 acres at 
Hector, Schuyler Co., N. Y., to which he removed with his family and 
the large families of his two slaves Tom and Sill that had been his 
wife's dowry. He was captain of militia 1797, was app'd major in 
1801, lieut. colonel 1804, and major general during the war of 1812, died 
from fever contracted in the service and was buried with military 
honors in the Presb. Churchyard at Ovid, his body being subscQueutly 
removed to Trumansburg. For his 10 ch. see p. 603. 

7. VI. ELIZABETH, b. prob. Feb., 1772, dec. ; was living in 1839 with Edward Ryan 

in Crawford Co., Pa. 

8. VII. DAVID, b. 1773, m. Anna Harris. 

(There may have been other ch.) 
42 



658 Ch. of Aaron Himrod, Sam. Phoenix & J. C. Smith. 

THIRD GENERATION. 
Aaron Himrod (2) had 13 ch. 

9. I. MOSES, b. at Northumb. Co., Pa.. 9 Jan.. 1790, d. at Waterford, Pa., 26 Sep., 

1808, m. 1.5 Jan., 1816, Nancy King, dau. of James Latimer of W., adeac. 
of John Latimer, of " The Irish Settlements" In the " Forks of the 
Delaware," she b. Jan., 1790, d. at Erie, Pa., 4 Oct., 1860; he served 4 
years from 1811, as lieut. and capt., 7 Co., 136 Reg. Pa. Militia. For his 
10 ch. see p. 666. 

10. 11. WILLIAM, b. in Northumb. Co., Pa., 19 May, 1791, d. at Erie, 21 June. 187.S, 

m. flrst 31 May, 1825, Aurelia H., dau. of George W. Reed, b. 10 Mch., 
1804, d. 6. Dec, 1844; m. second, 9 July, 184.5, Phoebe, wid. of Dr. Moore 
Bird Bradley and dau. of Bethuel Vincent (5). He was identified with 
the growth and prosperity of Erie being extensively engaged in the 
business of real estate, lumbering and building. He erected several 
hotels, in 1824 completed the new court house and in 1841 as one of the 
firm of Vincent, Himrod & Co. founded the large iron and stove works 
on 11th and State Sts. which have since been a source of much wealth 
to the city. He was active in the Presb. communion, untiring In 
works of usefulness and charity, and a firm friend to the abolition 
movement. In Dec, 1839 he established in his own house Erie's flrst 
negro Sunday school, still well-known as the •' Himrod-Mission." For 
his 5 ch. see p. 666. 

11. III. ANDREW, b. 9 Sep., 1792, d. 19 Aug., 1819. at Terre Haute, Ind., m. Sarah 

Crawford. 

12. IV. MARY FOSTER, b. 13 Aug.. 1794, d. at the res. of her dau. Mrs. Jacks, 

Milwaukee, Wis., m. 1 Sep., 1817, Amos P. Woodford; had 2 ch. 
I. Marinda, of Milwaukee, Wis., dec, m. Craig Jacks, of Harbor Creek, 
Pa., dec, has had one ch., Mary, dec, who m. H. Armour who lives 
in N. Y. C, and left 3 ch. 
n. Mary, dec, m. Munsen Guest, of Waterford, Pa., no ch. 

13. V. ELEANOR McGUIRE, res. near Waterford, Pa., b. 12 Mch., 1796, in North- 

umb Co., m. 20 Mch., 1822, to Samuel Phoenix, has 6 ch., 

I. Aaron, res. near Waterford. 

II. Sarah Chauii.la. res. Watertown tp., b. 25 Dec, 1829, m. Joseph O. 

Baldwin, of Cleveland, O.; their 3 ch., Marcia L., b. 1854, m. 1876, 
Charles O. Skinner, of Waterford; Selly M., b. 1859, m. 1887, a far- 
mer named Lain, of Wilraot, Cowley Co., Kan. ; and ^»i7ia M., b. 
1862. 

III. ISBELF.A, m. a Hunt. 

IV. Mary Elizabeth, res. Cowley Co., Kan., b. 4 Jan., 1839, m, 21 Sep., 
186.5, by Rev. Thomas T. Bradford, John K. Thompson, b. in Erie 
Co., Pa., 17 Jan., 1839; have 3 ch. living, one dec. 
V. John, d. at Libby Prison, Richmond, Va. 

VI. Samuel. 

14. VI. JOHN, b. in Northumb Co., Pa., 18 July, 1797, d. at Waterford 20 Mch., 1880, 

ra. first, by Rev. Robert Reed, 28 June, 1827, Rebecca Leetch, b. 1 May, 
1797, d. 15 June, 1861; m. second, by Rev. T. T. Bradford, 25 Nov.. 1862, 
Nancy Boyd, of Waterford, b. 22 Aug., 1798. For his 6 ch. see p. 667. 

15. VII. CATHERINE, b. in Waterford tp., 6 Jan., 1799, m. Saml. Gill, both dec; 

left one ch.. Mary, wid. of Cooksou Green, who lives 6 miles from 
Waterford, and has 2 sons and 5 daus. 

16. VIII. 8AR.\H, b. 2 July, 18O0, d. at Waterford 30 Jan., 1873, m. by Rev. Robt. 

Reed, 4 Apl., 1826, to John C. Smith, b. 1801, d. 30 July, 1881; had 4 ch., 
I. James, b. 7 Jan., 1827, d. 24 Jan., 1877, at Viueland, N. J., m. 12 May. 
1868, Carrie W. Ells. b. 8 Aug., 1844; their 2 ch., Mary Belle, b. 1869; 
and Flm-a Dell, d. 1871. 

II. Martha, res. Waterford, Pa., b. 22 Jan., 18.30, m. 18 Feb., 1&57, Frank C. 

Baxter; their 6 ch., Elsie S.. b. 1857; William K., b. i860, m. 1883, Ida 
M. Olmstead, has one ch. Lotty Ida, b. 1884; JoJm C. S., and Joseph 
M., twins, b. 1864; Mary /-'., b. 1867; Mattie C, b. 1872. 

III. JosiAH H., of Pueblo, Col., b. 23 Feb., 1832, d. 18 May, 1870, m. 8 Mch., 

186"), Margaret Leeper, of Canada, b. 11 Feb., 18.38; their one ch., 
Agnes Maud, Y>. 1806. 



Ch. of Aaron Himrod, Thomas Moore & John Kyan. 659 

rv. Caroline, b. 4 Sep., 1838, d. 12 Mch., 1868, m. 6 June, 1865, Alpheus 
Peck; their 1 ch., Sarah E., h. 1867, d. in infancy. 

17. IX. SIMON, b. 8 Jan., 1802, at Waterford, Pa,, d. there 1.3 May, 1874, ra. by Rev. 

Robt. Reed 13 Feb., 1828, Jane Moore, who d. about 1879. For 8 ch. see 
p. 667. 

18. X. ISABELLA, b. in Waterford tp., 27 Mch., 1804, d. there 27 Mch., 1880. 

19. XI. DAVID, b. in Waterford tp., 26 May, 1806, d. there, 23 Nov., 1877, ra. by 

Wm. Vincent, 4 July, 1833, Abigail Patten, b. in Maine, 18 Oct., 1812, 
her res. 537 Beldon Ave., Chicago, 111. David Himrod's great integrity 
and remarkable business capacity made him a conspicuous figure in 
the vicinity of Erie where much of his life was passed, and his promi- 
nent identity with the iron interest of the state together with his dis- 
coveries and inventions relating to that industry will render his repu- 
tation long enduring. With his brother William and Bethuel B. Vincent 
he was early engaged in smelting iron, and in 1844 his firm of Vincent, 
Himrod & Co. commenced building furnaces in the Chenango Valley. 
He was instrumental in the firm's experimenting with the use of 
stone coal instead of charcoal; he soon discovered that it made iron of 
the very best quality, and to him belongs the honor of supplying the 
first iron in the United States produced from bituminous coal. He 
was the first to investigate the Lake Superior ore region, and in 1854 
he produced iron of the finest quality from the raw material trans- 
ported from the northwest, thus opening up the immense ore fields of 
that country to the world. In 1859 he organized the Himrod Furnace 
Co., and continued to be its active manager until he retired from 
business in 1871. Altogether he was a remarkable man, and during 
his business career made an impression upon his time and generation, 
the effects of which will be felt as long as Pa.'s iron industries flourish. 
For his 10 ch. see p. 667. 

20. XII. MARTHA, b. in Waterford. Erie Co., Pa., 4 Jan., 1808, d. there. 25 Feb., 

1861, m. by John Boyd 2 Dec., 1834, Thomas Moore, b. 3 ApL, 1813, d. 4 

Nov., 1886, had 5 ch. 

I. Sarah, res. Waterford, Pa., b. 22 June, 1835, m. 22 Nov., 1854, Matthew 

Campbell, who d. 1887; their 5 ch., Martha E.. born 1856, m. 1886, 

Buman Gilkerson; Bertha J., b. 1859, m. 18S2 Marshall B. Hood, and 

has 1 ch., Ruth; Thomas K., b. 1860, d. 18G1; James M., b. 1863, d. 1887; 

George W., b. 1865, m. 1886, Jenny McLean, has 1 ch.. Sadie Esther. 

II. James, b. 18 May, 1839, d. at Waterford, 23 July, 1865, unm. 

III. Ralph, res. near Waterford, Pa., b. 24 Mch., 1842, m. by Rev. H. P. 

Jackson, 4 Mch., 1868, Sophia Avery; has 1 ch Sophia Avery, b. 1843. 

IV. Thomas Pbessly, b. 26 Oct., 1845, d. 13 June, 1882, m.4 Jan., 1871, Maggie 

J. Powell, b. 23 May, 1853, her res. Cochranton, Pa.; their 2 ch., 
Hugh H., and Fred U., twins, b. 1871. 
V. Kirk Canning, b. 3 Jan., 1854, d. li Dec, 1856. 

21. XIII. AARON MELICK, b. 28 June, 1809, d. of consumption in 1834, while study- 

ing for the ministry at Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, O. 

THIRD GENERATION. 

John and Catherine (Himrod) Ryan (3) had 9 ch. 

22. I. MARTHA, m. Archibald McNeill, of Crawford Co., Pa., who d. at MeadvlUe. 

She removed to Oshkosh, Wis.; their 5 ch., I. John. b. about 1808, d. 
1887; II. Elizabeth, m. Jtrst, Lewis Campbell, m. second and had ch.; 
III. Catherine, dec, m. Asa Hull, of Meadville; IV. Clinton, m. a 
Sherwood and lived at Hudson, Wis.; V. Edqar, m. and lived at Fond- 
du-lac. Wis. 

23. II. MARY, b. 13 Dec, 1789, d. at Memphis, Miss., 15 June, 1866, m. 19 Oct., 1809, 

Armand Martin, b. 26 Oct., 178.'>, d. 18 June, 1861, at West Point, Iowa, to 
which place he moved in 1845 from Erie Co., Pa.; had 9 ch. 
I. Angeline, b. 1811, d. 1848, m. 1829, Chas. Dillon McOill, of Saegertown, b. 
1802, d. 1875, had ch.; Mary Aim, who m. J. L. Kites, res. Hayfleld, 
Pa.. Oscar P., dec; Armand M., m. Matilda Briggs. res. Saeger- 
town; John E., m. Amelia A. Boyd, res. Saegertown; Emily Ellen, 
m. William S. Atfantranger, res. Meadville, Pa,; Andrew R.; 



660 Ch. of Armand Martin, John Wm. & Andrew Himrod. 

ex-Gov., of Minnesota, m. flrst, Lida Bryant, m. second, Mary E. 

Wilson, res. St. Anthony Park, Minn.; Sarah Augusta, m. 

Edward Powell, res. Greenville, Pa.; Frances Catherine, m. Henry 

C. Twitchell, les. Edinboro, Pa.; Anoeline Helen, m. Leon Koup. 
II. Emily C, b. 1813, d. 1880, ni. 1830, Joseph Grier Wilson, who d. 1888. at 

West Point, Iowa; had 7 ch., J/arj/, dec.; Sarah Jane, m. McRary; 

Andrew I'orter, dec; Josephine, m. Homer Hall; Charles E.; 

Henry D., m. Matilda C. Forley; Samuel M., m. Lizzie Thou, 
in. Charlotte, b. iSio, d. 1858, m. William D. Burnes, had l ch., Mina, m. 

Charles S. Kidjjeway, res. Canton, Mo. 
rv. Charles S., b. 1817, moved to Mo. in 1840, m. same year, Emily, dau. of 

Charles Mai-tin; had 5 cb., ilarij A., m. Samuel A. Allen; Anna 

Arista, m. William H. Barnes, res. Zanesville, O. ; Helen Maria; 

Henry Enrjene, m. Mary Thompson; Alice Irene, m. flrst, Robert N. 

Martin, second, Fehin Laudoy. 
V. John Ecdolphus, b. 1820, d. 1850, m. Elizabeth H. NichoUs, had 4 ch., 

Charles I'., liilled in Union Army, Little Rock, Ark., 1863; Robert 

y., m. Alice I. Martin; Adelaide, dec; Sabina, m. Horace McDowell. 
VI. Samuel, b. isa7, m. 1874, Mary A. Snyder, and has one ch. Alma. 
VII. Cordelia N., res. Canton, Mo., b. 1630, m. 1874, H. M. Wheeler. 
VIII. Maby S., res. Arbela, Mo., b. 1832, m. 1855, E. H. Wheeler; had 9 ch., 

RalpJi, dec; Jessie, dec; Effle, dec, who m. William Ventress; 

Orrie, dec; Carl, dec; Lottie, dec, ra. George Thomas; Edith, m. 

Levi Redout; Eric; Paul, dec. 
IX. William Manning, b. 18.W, entered Union Army, 1861, d. returning 

home, l':>t>4. 

24. III. SARAH, d. in Crawford Co., Pa., about 1823, m. a Douglas, and had one 

dau. Emeline, dec. 

25. IV. WILLIAM, b. 7 Nov., 1793, d. 4 Dec, 1871, m. 1818, Catherine, dau. of William 

Jones, of Meadville, Pa., b. i May, 1793, d. 16 ApL, 1856; their 11 ch., 
I. Margaret, b. 1819, d. 1844, unm. 

II. Emeline, res. Elk Creek, Cal., b. 1821, m. 1864, William S. Carver. 

III. Sarah, res. Pacific Grove, Cal., b. 182-2, m. 1850, Charles B. Donnelly, 

who d. 18.54, their 2 ch., James C, who m. Ellen A. Rhoads, and 
Effle C, dec, m. E. S. Campbell. 

IV. Amanda, res. Red Bluff, Tehama Co., Cal., b. 1824, unm. 
V, Simeon, res. The Homestead, Meadville, Pa., b. 1826, unm. 

VI. CoiiYDON, b. 1828, murdered by thieves in Cal. 1879, m. Mary D. Haas. 
VII. Martha, b. I83ii, m. 185.5, James A. Buckingham, and had 10 ch., of 
whom are living— .,^1«h(>, who m. Joseph Smith; Clara Adela, 
William Oscar, John Albert, Regina Belle and James Harper. 
VIII. Andrew, res. Red Bluff. Cal., b. 18.32, unm. 
IX. Catherine, res. Meadville, Pa., b. 183.5, unm. 
X. Isabella, b. 1835, m. 1858, Alexr. C. Hill; had 5 ch., Charles H'm., m. 
Delia May HoUenbeak; Winnie Catherine, m. Linnaeus PoUey; 
Jesse H., m. Ida Schofleld; Alfaretta; Aurelia R. 
XI. AuBELiA Himrod, res. White Sulphur Springs, Montana, b. 1837. m. 
1861, John C. Tipton; she owns the German Bible that belonged to 
Simon Himrod, the immigrant. 

26. V. ANDREW, b. 7 Sep., 1795. d. Crawford Co., Pa., about 1874, m. 26 Oct., 1820, 

dau. of William Jones, of Meadville, d. July, 1887; had 9 ch.. 
I. John A,, b. 1821, d. in Cal., 1875, m. 1848, Isabel, dau. of Truman Mal- 
lory. 
II. Adella, res. Brooklyn, N. ,Y., b. 182.3, ra. flrst, 1843, William M. Bar- 
rows, of Greenburgh, Pa., who d. 1862; m. second, 1864, James Dens- 
moi'c, lawyer, editor, and publisher, b. near Rochester, N. Y., 1820, 
d. 16 Sep., 1889, in Brooklyn; by flrst marriage had 3 ch., viz. :— 
Ernest R., res. Brooklyn, m. Rachael Wyman; Walter John, res. 
Brooklyn, m. Frances Evelyn Carlin; i'rtC"»''. d, unm. By second 
marriage had one ch., Dorsa. 

III. Edward, res. Dakota, b. 1825, m. 1847, Margaret CoUum; their 2 ch., 

Helen, who m. Henry Barber; and Jessie. 

IV. Eliza, b. 1827, m. 1849, Henry Womersley, b. 1821, d. 1875; their 6 ch., 

Henry R.; Adella Antoinette, res. Brooklyn, m. Edward RauftI 



Ch. of John Ryan, John McGill & Andrew Himrod. 661 

John W., dec; John Andrew, dec; Annie P., ni. William Craston, 
of Eug-land; John, m. Emma Morris 
V. Sarah J., res. Center Co., Pa., b. 1830, m. 1846, Michael Cole ; their 9 
ch., William; Anarew,va. Eliza Warner; John A., dec; Isabel, dec; 
Franlc ; Ernest ; Alexander ; Ida and Elmer. 
VI. William Swazey, res. Nebraska, b. 1832, m. 1855, Harriet, dau. of 
David Barrows, of Greensburg-, Pa. ; their 7 ch., CJiarles, m. Alice 
Clarke; Henry; Ida, m. George Benson; George; Edgar; Tina, dec; 
Tinnie. 
VII. Mary Isabel, res. Carbondale, Col., b. 1834, m. first, 1856. George H. 
Collom, m. second, 1883, Thomas Graham; had 2 ch., both by Ist 
mari-iage, FranceUa R., who m. George Johnson, and Harry, who 
m. Phoebe Metzenbaucher, and lives in Chicago. 
VIII. Andrew W.,b. 1836, d. at St. Paul, Minn., 1887, m. 1870 Celia Green; 
fheiv Z ch., George William; Celia Agnes ; and Eliza Gerievefa. 
IX. George Plummer, res. Longstand, Crawford Co., Pa., b. 1843. m. 
1866, Sarah, dau. of Asa Gehr, of Woodcock, Pa. ; served through- 
out the civil war with much credit in 150th Pa. Regt. (Buck- 
tails), captured at Gettysburg, confined in Libby and other 
prisons until exchanged when he rejoined his regt.; was sheriff of 
Crawford Co., Pa., 1875 to 1878; served as ordnance officer and asst. 
adj. genl. 6th brig. Pa. N. G. 1878 to 1881; had 9 ch., Almont; Duff P.; 
who m. a Miss Sherrick; Minnie S., Andreio A.; Ernest B.; George; 
James; Xorman and Adella. 

27. VI. EDWARD, b. 2 Oct., 1797, d. 16 July, 1878, m. first, 7 June, 1834, Elizabeth 

Clarke, of Crawford Co., Pa., b. 1806, d. 1840, m. second, Harriet —; no ch, 

28. VII. ISABELLA, b. 38 Oct., 1800, d. '25 Mar., 1876, at Saegertown, Pa., m. 12 July. 

1833, John McGill, of Saegertown, b. 19 Oct., 1795, d. 37 Oct., 1878; had 6 
ch. 
I. Catherine, b. 1833, d. 1825. 
II. Anna Maria, res. Saegertown, b. 1834. 

III. Sarah C, b. 1826, d. 1875, m. 1854 Robert Hunter. 

IV. Augustus, Ed. of the Weekly Press, Saegertown, Pa., b. 1828, m. 1855. 

Sarah Peiflier, of Venango, Pa., b. 1836; their 4 ch., William. R.; 
Isabella, m. W. B. Hough; Lilian, m. M. O. Campbell, of Smethport, 
Pa. ; and Rebecca, dec. 
V. Eliza R., res. Hydetown, Pa., b. 1830, m. 1864, James R. Fleming, and 
has several ch. 
VI. William R., res. Harmonsburg, Pa., b. 183.3, m. 1861, Caroline A. 
Harkin, b. 1839; has 9 ch. 

29. VIII. CATHERINE, twin. b. 38 Oct., 1800, dec, m. John Scott dec. : had 1 ch. 

I. William R., who is an attorney-at-law, Meadville, Pa. 

THIRD GENERATION. 
Andrew Himrod (4) had 7 ch. 

30. I. SARAH, b. in Northurab. Co., Pa., 33 Jan., 1795, d. at Berkshire, Del. Co., O., 

31 Dec, 1866, m, 10 Jan., 1832, Zelotes Jones, of Berkshire, b. 80 Apl., 
1797, d. in Otoe Co., Neb., 37 Jan., 1874, had 5 ch., 1. Martha, b. 17 Nov., 
1823. II. Solomon, b. 8 Aug., 1826. III. Andrew K., b. 25 Mch., 1831; 
David, b. 14 Dec, 18.35, d. 29 Aug., 1864; V. Sarah, b. 3 Sep., 1837. 

31. II. MARTHA, was blind, and unra. in 1839. 

32. III. ISABELLA, b. in Norlhumb. Co., Pa., 14 Aug., 1801, d. Canaan tp., Morrow 

Co., O., 27 Mch., 1863, m. 36 June, 1833, John Rice, b. 1794, d. 1868, their 8 
ch., I. Rachel, b. 8 May, 1834; II. Catharine, b. 4 Sep., 1835; III. Jacob, 
b. 22 Aug., 1827; IV. Lydia, b. 30 July, 1839; V. Maria, b. 18 Mch.. 18;J2; 
VI. Isabel, b. 6 Dec. 1836; VII. Simon Himrod, b. 24 Apl., 1840; VIII. 
Paul Kester, b. 29 June, 1842. 

33. IV. CATHERINE, b. at Milton, Pa., 14 Nov., 1803, d. Delaware, O., 23 June, 1884, 

m. 6 May, 1839, Alexander Anderson, b. 15 July, 179G, d. 30 Mar., 1860, 
held the office of constable and coroner, had 5 ch., 
I. William, b. 15 Apl., 1833, d. 1875, has 1 son, Clias., ,9., res. Delaware, O. 
II. Isabella, res. Wescott, Custer Co., Neb., b. 5 June, 1835. 
in. John Alexander, b. 19 Feb.. 1839, d. 1884, had one son, Louis, res. Del- 
aware, O. 



662 Ch. of Andrew Him rod and Bethuel Vincent. 

IV. Andrew Matthew, b. 21 Apl., 1841, is adjutant of the Ohio Soldiers' 

and Sailors' Home at Sandusky. 
V. James Gillis, b. 2i Mch., 1843, d. 1867. 
34. V. MARIA, m. Georjfs Welch, of Oxford, Del. Co., O. 

:«. VI. SIMON, b. 4 Oct., 1809, at Milton, Pa., d. July, 1837, in Del. Co., O., m. 1837, 
Charlotte, (probably) Caulkins. Charlotte (Caulkins) Himrod m. 
Daniel M. Janes, and d. 10 Mch., 1856. 

36. VII. MARGARET, b. at Milton, Pa., 16 Feb., 1814, d. in Del. Co., O., 14 Dec., 

1885, m. 12 Sept. 1838, Joseph Raleson, of Berkshire, O., who d. 24 July, 
1877, had 6 ch., I. SiMON, b. 1 Jan., 1840, killed in battle of Gettysburg, 2 
July, 1863; II. Henrietta, res. Bei-lin, Del. Co., O., b, 10 Dec., 1840, m. 
a Smith; III. Lemuel, b. 22 Feb., 1842, d. 23 Aug,, 1863; IV. Louisa, b. 
22 June, 1846; V. Fidelia, b. 5 Nov., 1849. 

THIRD GENERATION. 

Bethuel and Martha (Himrod) Vincent (5) had 8 ch. 

37. I. SARAH, b. 13 Dec, 1788, d. 30 Oct., 1839, on her husbands plantation near 

Mobile, Ala,, of yellow fever; m. Col. John B. Hogan, of U. S. army; 
had 5 ch. 

I. Anne M., d. 1842, m. G. H. Byard, Cash. Bank, of Mobile, had 2 daus.. 

1 dec. 

II. Amelia, res. Mobile, Ala., wid. of Oliver S. Beers. 

III. Sarah, res. Canada, m. Rev. William Meikl. 

IV. Lucy, dec. m. Thomas Hamilton, lawyer of Mobile. 

V. John B., d. leaving a wid. and^2 ch. 

38. II. WILLIAM, b. 4 July, 1790, d. 19 Mch., 1872, at Waterf ord. Pa., m. 20 Feb., 1817, 

Elsie J. dau. of Thomas Nicholas, of Pine Creek, Pa., dec. ; had 9 ch. 
I. John Pericles, res. Erie, Pa., lawyer and judge, b. 1817, m. 1845, Har- 
riet S., dau. of John Shadduck, of Wesleyville, Pa., who d. 1888; 
has 2 ch. Harriet Frances; and Catherine Elsie. 

II. Margaret Martha, b. 1819, d. 1841, unm. 

III. George Calhoun, b. 1821, d. 1847, m. wife dec. ; left 2 ch., George T., of 

San Francisco, Cai. ; and Frank of Mobile, Ala. 

IV. Anna Bella, res. Waterford, Pa., ra. F. B. Strong and has 7 ch. 

V. Thomas N., b. 182.5, dec, ra. and left 1 son. 

VI. Phebe Maria, b. 1827, m. Samuel Hae, who is dec. 

VII. Oscar Bethuel, b. Oct., 1829, dec, leaving wid. and 2 sons at Webster 
City, Iowa. 
VIII. William H., b. 1832, d. 1852, unm. 
IX. Sarah Hogan, now P. M. at Waterford, Pa., b. 11 Feb., 1838. 

39. III. DANIEL, b. 17 Jan., 1792, d. 6 Oct., 1858, at Waterford, Pa., m. 25 July, 1815, 

Rachel, dau. of Thos. Brown, of Bucks Co., Pa.; d. 28 May, 1868; Daniel 
moved from Milton to Waterford in 1826 where he was a farmer and 
tanner, a trustee of the Waterford Academy, and for many years elder 
of the Presb. Church; his 10 ch. : 
I. Richard M., b, 1816, dec. 

II. Thomas Brown, res. Erie, Pa., b. 26 3Iar., I8I8, m. 19 Oct., 1842, Lydia 
W. Strong. 

III. William, b. 1820, m. 1842, Ellen Van Nest, of Quincy, III. 

IV. Moses S., b. 1821. 

V. Sarah Ann, b. 1823, m. 1845, Wm. R. Lockwood. 

VI. Martha Margaret, b. 1825, m. 1853, George W. R. Himrod. 

VII. Mary Elizabeth, twin, b. 18'25, dec. 

Vlll. John H.. b. 1828, dec. 

IX. Mary E., twin, b. 1828, dec. 

X. Elizabeth, res. Erie, Pa., b. IftJO, m. 6 Sept., 1866, Dr. Wm. Faulkner. 

40. IV. MARY, b. 14 Mar., 1794, d. 15 Nov., 1830, at Mobile, Ala., m. Wra. T. Brown; 

has one ch. living, Mrs. Elizabeth K. Raser, who resides with a 
dau. iVr.i. James Belknap, at Erie, Pa.; grandchildren named Schroder, 
ch. of a dec. dau. now living in N. Y. city. 

41. V. BENJAMIN (Capt.) b. 6 June, 1796. d. 30 Oct., 1839, of yellow fever at Mobile, 

Ala., left ch., who are dec. ; has probably graudch., ch. of his dec. sons, 
Benjamin and Charles living at Mobile. 



Ch. of Bethuel Vincent and William Himrod. 663 

42 VI. JOHN HIMROD, b. 20 Apl., 1798, d. 13 Au(r-. 1873, at Erie, Pa., m. first, at 
Demopolis, Ala., 6 Sep., 1821, Mary Baser, b. 30 July. 1803, d. 16 Feb., 
1852, by whom 4 ch.; he m. second at Erie, Pa., 2 June, 1852, Ann 
Kichards, b. 22 Feb., 182.5, by whom 4 ch.; he lived at Tuscaloosa, Ala., 
until 1838, when he removed to Chillisquaqua, Northum. Co.. Pa., 
thence in 1852 to Erie, Pa., thence a few years later to Chicago, III.; 
his i ch. by first wife were 
I. John Heyl. D. D., LL. D.. res. Buffalo, N. Y.. b. Ala. 23 Feb., 1832, m. 
ax, Portville, N. Y., 10 Nov., 1858, to Elizabeth, dau. of Henry Dusen- 
bury, of Deposit, N. Y. Dr. John H. Vincent was educated at 
Lewisburff Academy, in Pa., and the Wesleyan Inst.. Newarli, N- 
J., licensed to preach in 1850 and was admitted to the N. J. Annual 
Conference (Methodist) in 1853, transferred in 1857 to the Bocli 
Biver Conference, 111., he oflBciated as pastor at Joliet, Mount 
Morris, Galena, Bockford, and Chicago, until 1865. In that year he 
established the Northwestern Sunday-School Quarterly, and The 
Sunday-school Tea:cher In 1866; in this year he was appointed Gen. 
Agt. of Meth. Epis. Sunday-School Union and in 1868 was elected 
Cor. Secy, of same. In 1888 he was elected, at the quadrennial ses- 
sion of the General Conference, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church. Few public men, it is believed, have exercised greater 
Influence on popular education than he. His greatest achieve- 
ment is the Chatauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, which now, 
in its 12th year, has spread over Christendom, and numbers nearly 
100,000 members. As a still higher means of educating the masses 
he hassucceeded by his tireless activity and administrative genius in 
establishing the Chatauqua University, of which he is the Chancel- 
lor. He has one son, George Edgar, b. in 1864. 
IL Bethoel Thomas, res. Greeley, Col., b. 1h:^, at Tuscaloosa, Ala. ; was 
pastor of Fortieth St. M. E. church, Phila., in 1887. 

III. Frank Lyon, M. D., b. 1839, d. 1889 at Clifton Springs, N. Y., m. first. 

Maggie Jordon, of Jamestown, N. Y., d. 18G6; m. second, 1868, Anna 
dau. of Martin Curtis; b. 1836; Dr. Frank L. Vincent graduated 
from Hahnemann Med. Col. of Chicago, rec'd deg. of A. M. from 
Hamilton Col. 187,3, practiced medicine in Illinois and New York, 
and at time of death was on medical staff of Clifton Springs Sani- 
tarium; had two ch., Robert H. and Frank R.. of Troy, N. Y. 

IV. Mary Elizabeth, m. James O. Farovid, and lives at Hyde Park, 
Chicago, 111. 

John Himrod Vincent had 4 ch. by second wife, viz.. 
V. Charles Bichard, res. N. Y. C, b. 4 Oct., 1854. 
VI. Henry, b. 26 Dec, 1855. 
VII. William, b. 8 Mar., 1802. 
VIII. Anna, res. 451 Janis St., Toronto, Can., ra. G. D. Massey. 

43. VII. PHOEBE, b. 1800, d. in infancy. 

44. VIII. PHOEBE, b. 23 Mar., 180.3, m. first 1839, Moore B. Bradley, M. D., of Water- 

ford, Pa., b. 1790, d. 1841; ra. second, 1845, her cousin William Himrod 
(10) of Erie, Pa., b. 1791, d. 1873, had 1 ch., Moore Bird, b. 1840, d. 1842. 

THIRD GENERATION. 
William Himrod (6) had lo ch. 

45. I. MARIA, b. at Somerville, N. J., 22 Apl., 1792. d. at Trumansburg. N. Y., 13 

Aug.. 1870, m. 15 June, 1811, as a second wife, John McLallen, b. at West 
Stockbridge, Mass., 25 Dec, 1773, d. at Trumansburg, 16 Dec, 1844. He 
removed to N. Y. state in 1792, and obtained from his bro.-in-law. 
Abner Treman, a piece of land at the present site of Trumansburg 
upon which he built the first tavern in the village. Treman had been 
a Revolutionary soldier and reed, for his military services a strip of 
land about three-quarters of a mile wide and two miles long embody- 
ing the site of Trumansburg, the village dealvlng its name from this 
ex-soldier. Had 9 ch. 
I. William Himrod. b. 18 May, 1812, d. -30 Nov., 1887, at Aurora, 
111, to which place he removed about 1867, m. 5 Oct., 



Ch. of Wm. Himrod, J. McLallen & Alvah Bement. 

1843, Matilda, dau. of Michael Bij^jfs, of Lodi, N. Y., b. 13 Aug:., 
1822, d. 27 Aug., 1868; their 3ch., JoJiu James, city clerk of Aurora, 
III., b. 1844, m.l874, Ella J., dau. of Daniel J. Emerson, of Rockford, 
111., b. 1 May, 1848, has 3 ch. ; Mary, b. 1848, d. 1884, m. 1872, Lauren 
Ford Otis, of Aurora, III., b. 1842, left 2 ch.; Emily, b. 1858, d. in 
infancy. 
II. Edward Ely (Col.), b. 1 Jan., 1814, d. 27 May,1886, at Truraansburgr, 
nnm.; he was a man of hisfh standing' in business and social com- 
munities and was greatly respected; entered the state national 
guard and rose from the ranks to the command of aregt. ; for 
many years he was an authority upon matters pertaining to civil 
engineering. 

III. John, b. 19 July. 1815, d. at Steamburg, Schuyler Co., N. Y., 21 Jan.. 

1854, m. 19 Feb.. 1846, Ann E., dau. of Joshua McKeel, her res. 
Mount Vernon, Iowa, their 2 ch., De Witt, b. 1850, and Bertha, b» 
ia51, m. 1875, Thomas Bower, and. res. Waterburg, Tompkins Co., 
N. Y. 

IV. Mary King, b. 26 Jan., 1817. d. 17 Jan., 1847, m. 26 Aug., 18.39, Lemuel 

Dorrance Branch, b. 21 Sep., 1815, d. 15 Mch., 1860; their 2 ch., d. in 
infancy. 
V. Dewitt Clinton, b. 3 May 1818, d. 3 Sep., 1845, unm. 
VI. Philemon Fkrdinand, b. 20 Aug., 1823, d. at St. Louis, Mo.. 4 June, 
1853, unm., grad. at Yale College with honors in 1847, studied law 
and located at St. Louis, where he d. when apparently just cross- 
ing the threshold of a brilliant professional and public career. He 
earlj' won the esteem of the citizens of bis adopted state and had 
already become identified with the interests of the city and com- 
monwealth. Almost a giant in stature his dignified, though 
affable manners, and his winning personality attracted all with 
whom he came in contact, while his undoubted talents and high 
character commanded respect and admiration. 
VII. Calvin, b. 2G Apl.. 1825, d. In infancy. 

VIII. Margaret, b. 26 Apl., 1826, at Trumansburg, N. Y. ; "after 31 years of 
helpless sutfering," inflammatory rheumatism confined her to a 
chair, but she bore her affliction with cheerfulness, and took plea- 
sure in the society of her friends and of her brother Edward from 
whom she reed, the tenderest care; no services were too onerous 
for him to perform that would contribute to her comfort or 
alleviate her sufferings. 
IX. Elias King, b. l May, 18'28, d. 29 July, 1845. 
4C. II. PETER, b. 25 Feb.. 1794, d. 30 Aug., 1868, at Cayuga, N. Y.; m. Jlrst, 8 Aug:.. 
1818, Mabel, dau. of John McMath, of Ovid, N. Y., b. 15 July, 1797, d. 7 
Feb., 1836; m. second, 6 July. 1830, Mary, wld. of Charles Towar, of 
Lyons. N. Y., and dau. of John Leonard, of Ovid. N. Y.. b. 28 Apl., 1800, 
d. 12 Oct., 18.59; m. tJtird, 30 Oct., 1861, Sophronia, dau. of Charles Bailey, 
of Ithaca, N. Y., b. 27 Feb.. 1821. Peter Himrod lived for many years 
at Ovid and Lodi, was an active business man and farmer of high 
character, and rose through successive ranks to be major-general 
of the state militia. He possessed a commanding and well-propor- 
tioned figure, surmounted by a noble and winning countenance. He 
was eminently conscientious and strong in his religious principles. For 
his 8 ch. see p. 668. 
47. III. CATHERINE SUTPHEN, b. 8 July, 1796, d. 13 Apl.. 1876, at Burnett, Wis., 
m. 8 Apl., 1815, as second wife Alvah Bement, b. 23 Nov., 1791, d. 27 
Mch., 1842, had 9 ch.. 
L Abigail Mariah, b. 20 Apl.. 1816, d. 2 Oct., 1842, m. 1834, William 

Thayer. 
II. Margaret Himrod, b. 9 Feb.. 18l8, d. 5 June, 1839. 

III. William, res. Evansville, Wis., b. 4 Mch., 1820, m. 15 June, 1842, Sarah 

Rosekrause. 

IV. David Himrod, b. 11 Mch., 1822, m. 12 Mch.. 1845, Mary Ann Dickerson, 

b. 10 Mch.. 1827; their 3 ch., ATvin, b. 1847, m. 1869, Jane Leath, 
WilUain. b. 1849, d. 1877, m. 1874, Mary Leath; Maggie, b. 1857, d. 18C0. 

V. Erastcs R., res. Oregon, Dane Co., Wis., b. 2 Apl., 1824, m. 20 July, 

1849, Catherine Kirtz. 



Ch. of Wm. Himrod, E. Bement & Milo Van Dusen. 665 

VI. Alvah, b. 4 July, 1827, d. 21 Mch., 1829. 
VII. Harriet Elizabeth, b. 18 Dec, 1829, d. 2 Sep., 1836. 
VIII. Catherine, res. Burnett Station, Dodg-e Co., Wis., b. 9 Aug-., 1832, m. 8 
Dec, 1850. Nathan F. Thomas; their 4 ch., Theresa, b. 1851, d. 1852; 
Wtti. Edwara, b. 1854; Marij Ella, b. 1858; Maria Ella, twin, b. 1858. 
IX. Louisa, b. lo Oct., 1839, d. 16 Jan., 1840. 

48. IV. MARGARET, d. in youth. 

49. V. ELLEN, b. about 1800, d. at Cuba, N. Y., Oct., 1877, m. Erastus Bement, bro. 

of her sister's husband, b. about 179.3, d. 1876; had 5 ch., 
I. William H., d. about 1854, at Buffalo, N. Y. 
II. Lewis H., res. Ithaca, N. Y., b. lo Mch., 1821, ra. 15 Aug., 1844, Phebe, 
dau. of Lemon Morehouse, of Armenia, N. Y. ; their 5 ch., Frank, 
res. Wilson, O., b. 1846, m. and hasl ch.; Frederick, b. 1848, d. 1865; 
Burt, b. 1852, d. 1844; Edioara, res. Ithaca, N. Y., b. 1857, m. Etta 
Pereg-o; Lewis, b. 1865. 
III. Ellen, d. in youth IV. Nelson, V. AVilbur, res., Cuba., N. Y. 

50. VI. LEWIS, b. at Lodi, N. Y., 1802, d, at Aurora, N. Y., m. Harriet Brownell; he 

was associated with Captain Wilcox and the Morgans ol Aurora in the 
ownership of steamboats on Cayug-a Lake; has one ch., Carrie, res. 
Aurora, who m. Charles R. Bush and has 2 ch., Charles and Lizzie. 

51. VII. JUDITH, b. l8o4, d. at Trumansburg-, N. Y., 13 Oct., 1881, m. about 1830, 

Milo Van Dusen, b. 17 May, 1800 ,d. 28 Mch., 1874. During the last 45 years 

of her life she was totally blind but it did not prevent her performing 

household duties and in needleworls she was especially expert. She 

was possessed of active, energetic and intelligent qualities; had 2 ch. 

I. William Himrod, res. Hornellsville, N. Y., b. 26 May, 1831, m. 11 Nov., 

1862, Cornelia, dau. of Walker Glazier, b. 28 Oct., 1830. He was 

chief clerk of Motive Power Dept., Western Div. N. Y., Lake Erie, 

and W. R. R. Co., but has now retired from active business; their 2 

ch., James M., b. 1869, and Minnie Cornelia, b. 1871. 

II. Belinda Loraine, res. Trumansburg, N. Y., b. 14 Nov., 1332, m. 13 

Oct., 1857, Waldron B. Dumont; their 3 ch., i^reti S., b. 1858, d. 1881; 

Isabella J., b. 1860, d. 1888, m. 1885, Harper J. Goodyear, left one ch. 

Charles Bush. b. 1868. 

52. VIII. WILHEMUS MYNDERSE, b. 1807, d. 10 May, 1858, at Brooklyn, N. Y., m. 

Jlrst, 16 Oct., 1830, Christina Selfredge. who d. 30 Oct., 1840; m. second, 
1841, Elizabeth, dau. of Henry Winters, of Broadway, N. J., b. 10 May, 
1812, d. 30 Nov., 1883; had 4 ch. 
I. John De Mott, res. 453 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, b. 29 Oct., 1840, m. 
27 Sept., 1870. by Rev. Dr. J. Halsted Carroll, Mary Ellen Smith; 
served in Civil war in Co. A, 10 Reg. N. Y. Volunteers and Battery 
L. 4th Artillery ; has for many years been connected with the N. 
Y. and Havanna S, S. line; their 2 ch., Willia'm and Edward. 
II. Mary Ann, b. Mch., 1843, dec. 

III. Catherine W., res. 146 South Portland Ave., Brooklyn, b. 7 Oct., 1846, 

m. Benjamin H. Lawton, Jun'r. of Newport, R. I., b. 3 0ct., 1840; their 
2 ch., Frederick B., b. 28 June, 1870. and Benjamin H.. b. 1871, d. 1872. 

IV. Elizabeth H., res. 142 South Portland Ave., Brooklyn, b. 17 Apl., 

1849, m. 22 Sept.. 1869, William T. Whitmore, of Middle Haddam, 
Conn., b. 20 Sept. , 1841 ; he entered U. S. Navy as paymaster. Aug., 
1862, resigned, 1865; their 4 ch., .Be.ss/e L.. b. 20 Aug., 1870; William 
T., b. 1 Jan., 1872; Arthur E.. b. 28, Nov., 1874; Raymoud D., b. Oct., 
1885. 

53. IX. DAVID W., res. Trumansburg, N. Y., b. 16 July, 1809. m. 22 Aug.. 1833. 

Christiana, dau. of William Gibson, of Kircudbright, Scotland, and 
a desc. of Sir Alexander Gibson, of Durie, Co. Fife, Scotland, b. 6 May, 
1811; her father was a merchant in N. Y. until 1812 when he removed 
to Springfield. Otsego Co., N. Y. For many years David Himrod was 
an elder in the Presb. Church at Trumansburg, N. Y., and at Dun- 
more, Pa. ; was postmaster of latter place, 1880-5, and at one time was 
major (staff) N. Y. Militia. For his 8 ch. see p 069. 

54. X. JOHN SUTPHEN, (Rev.) b. 14 Dec, 1812, d. at Greeuport, Col. Co., N. Y., 

20 Nov., 1883, m. 30 Apl., 1845, Catherine Neilson, dau. of Dr. Augustus 
R. Taylor, of New Brunswick, N. J., d. 27 Jan., 18t*4; hegrad. at Rut- 



666 Ch. of Moses and William Himrod. 

g'ers College In 1839, and at Theo. Sem. at New Brunswick in 1842. In 
the ministry of the Reformed Church he was exceptionally successful 
his labors in all the congreg-ations he served being attended with rich 
results. His several charges were at Hillsdale, N. Y., 3 years, Claver- 
ack, N. y., 6 years, South Bushwick Ref. Church, Brooklyn, 8 years, 
and Greenport, N. Y., where was " spent 20 years of unremitting toil 
and successful achievement." His name Is perpetuated by Himrod 
Street in Brooklyn, which was named in his honor during his pastor- 
ate In that city. 

FOURTH GENERATION. 

Moses Himrod (g) had lo ch. 

55. I. ADALINE, b. 2 Dec, 1816. m. 2 Sep., 1845, Flavel Boyd, b. 6 July, 1812, d. 29 

July. 1889; had one dau., b. and d. Oct., 1856; she occupies the farm of 
her grandfather, Aaron (2). 

56. II. JOHN LATTIMORE. res. Humboldt, Iowa, b. 23 Aug., 1818, m. 20 May, 1851, 

Mary Elizabeth Bro.wn, b. 9 June, 1826, d. 8 Mch., 1867, at Kingsvllle, O. ; 
had 8 ch., 
I. BONITA, res. Dryden, N. Y., b. 6 Mch., 1852, m. 5 Feb., 1873, Qev. Edward 
Augustus Mirick, b. 16 Mch., 1840; their 2 ch., Lillian, b. 12 Hov., 
187-3, and Erlwara Himrod, b. 23 Sep., 1878. 
II. TovEY Bkown, res. Weaver, Iowa, b. 19 Aug., 1853, m. at Redwing, 
Minn.. 13 Nov., 1877, Dorcas Williams; their 2 ch., James L., b. 20 
Nov., 1879, and William B., b. 2 Feb., 188.3. 

III. Adaline Boyd, res. Neosho Falls, Kan., b. 9 Jan., 18.56. 

IV. Ruth Amanda, res. Humboldt, Iowa, b. 23 Sep., 1857. 

V. Margaret Cordelia, b. l July, 1859, grad. Womens' Med. Coll., N. Y, 

Infirmary, 28 May, 1888. 
VI. Ella. res. Humboldt, Iowa, b. 25 July. 1861. 
VII. Grace Hammond, res. Omaha, Neb., b. 23 July, 1863. 
VIII. Joseph Boyd, res. Waterford, Pa., b. 25 Feb., 1867. 

57. III. MARY ANN, res. Waterford, Pa., b. 9 Feb., 1820. 

58. IV. ISABELLA, twin, b. 9 Feb., 1820, d. 14 Feb., 1830. 

59. V. AARON MELLICK, res. Waterford, Pa., b. 23 Jan., 1822, m. 14, May, 1853 

Mary Jane Cook, b. 4 Dec, 1826, d. 6 Mch., 1885; had 7 ch. 
I. Moses L.. b. 12 Sep., 1854, dec. m. 29 June, 1882, Mary L. Mitchell, b. 
12 Apl., 1861, their 1 ch., Cassie May, b. 18 May, 1883. II. Eva Anna, 
b. 15 June, 1850. III. Lee, b. 10 Sep., I8d.-!. IV. Alfred C, b. 2 Dec, 
1860. V. Frank H., b. 7 June, 1862. VI. Belle, b. 4 Mch., 1865. 
VII. Carl H., b. 1 Aug., 1868. 

60. VI. DAUGHTER, b. and d. Oct., 1826. 

61. VII. MARGARET CORDELIA, twin, b. 8 Oct., 1826, drowned 24 Oct., 1853. 

62. VIII. JAMES WALKER, res. Waterford, Pa., b. 13 Sep., 1828, ra. 16 Jan., 1861, 

Isabellas. Riddle, b. 25 Dec, 1828, d. 28 Aug.. 1877; had 1 ch., Jenny 
Cook, b. 27 Apl.. 1869. 

63. IX. SARAH ANN, res. Waterford, Pa., b. 30 Dec, 1829, m. 29 Apl., 1856, Harvey 

Boyd, bro. of her sister Adaline's (38) husband, b. 21 Feb., 1815; have 3 
ch., I. John F., b. :30 Mch., 1858; II. Elizabeth L., b. 11 Oct., i860; III. 
Sarah Anna, b. 3 Feb., 1802. 

64. X. WILLIAM D.. res., Waterford, Pa., b. 21 Feb., 1832, m. 18 Dec. 1856, Frances 

Sarah, dau. of S. J. Trask, of W.; had 6 ch., I. Henry R., b. 18 Apl., 
1858; II. Ralph B., res. Onona, Iowa, b. 8 Sep., 1859, III. Nancy L., b. 
1861, d. 1838; IV. Paul M. O., res. Wichita. Kan., b. 28 Oct., 1863; V. 
Harvey Boyd, b. 15 Oct., 1809; VI. William C, b. 11 Feb., 1878. 

FOURTH GENERATION. 

William Himrod (10) had 5 ch. 

65. I. PHILEWA H. R., b. 17 Apl., 1826, d. 11 Feb., 1835. 

66. II. AARON, b. and d. 17 Apl., 1831. 

67. III. GEORGE W. R.. twin, res. Lockport, III., b. 17 Apl.. 1831, m. 28 June, 1853, 

Martha Margaret, dau. of Daniel Vincent, of Waterford, Pa., b. 5 Oct., 
1825; their 3 ch.. I. Fred, b. 28 Aug., 1854, II. Maby. b. 4 May, 1856, III. 
Martha, b. 1 Nov., 1857. 



Ch. of John, Simon and David Himkod. 667 

68. IV. SAMUEL H., b. 17 Mch., 1834, m. and has 2 ch., Mellick and Frank. 

69. V. WILLIAM H. J. K., res. Erie, Pa., b. 13 May. 1841, m. 11 Dec, 1862, Julia A., 

dau. of Presley Arbuckle. of Erie, b. 23 Feb., 1S40; had 7 ch., 
I. Presley A., b. 23 Oct., 1863; II. William DeWitt, b. 21 Oct., 1865; 
III. Henry Reed, b. 21 Oct., 1868, d. in infancy; IV. Ray, b. 16 June, 
1872; V. Julia Allison, b. 2 Mch., 1876; VI. Harwood B., b. 11 Mch., 
1878, VII. Helen Louise, b. 23 Oct., 1882. 

FOURTH GENERATION. 

John Himrod (14) had 6 ch. 

70. I. JOHN A., b. 20 June, 1828, drowned 17 May, 1852. 

71. II. A SON, b. 22 July, 1829, d. 17 Aug., 1829. 

72. III. SUSAN L., b. 17 Sept., 18.30. d. 20 Sept., 1832. 

73. IV. AARON W.. b. 10 Apl., 1832, drowned 30 Apl., 1834. 

74. V. WILLIAM, b. 24 July, 1834, d. at Stillwater. Minn., 18 Sept.. 1886, m. 5 Aug-., 

1863, Frances A. L. J. Conover, of Marion, O. ; he was a private in civil 
war wounded at Malvern Hill, 2 July, 1862; had 3 ch., I. Emma Louise, 
b. 19 Jan., 1866; II. Kate Marion, b. 9 Dec. 1867; III. Helen L. U., 
. b. 10 Sept., 1873, d. 17 Apl., 1882. 

75. VI. HELEN MARY, res. Racine, Wis., b. 4 Apl., 1838, m. 3 June 1856, George Q. 

Erskine, b. 13 Dec, 1827, he is pres. of a bank in Fargo, Dak., and of one 
in Crookston, Minn.; have2ch.; I. Helen Rosaline, b. 16 Oct.. 1858; 
II. Ethel Aurelia, b. 27 Jan., i860, m. 19 Oct., 1886, Sheldon W. Vance, 
Prof, of Mod. languages at State University, Vermillion, Dak., 

FOURTH GENERATION. 

Simon Himrod (17) had 8 ch. 

76. I. NANCY, b. IS Aug., 1829, d. 27 Jan., 1869, at Cedarville, O., m. 1866, John F. 

Frazier, of C. ; had 1 ch. I. John H., b. 19 Jan., 1869. 

77. II. ELIZABETH, b. 15 Oct., 1830, d. 9 Jan., 1873, m. Henry Hugh Whitney, of 

Waterford, Pa.; had 3 ch., I Celia, b. 15 Nov., 1862; II. Mabel, b. 10 
Nov., 1867; III, Parkes, b. 19 Aug., 1870. 

78. III. AARON, b. 5 Apl., 1832, d. 15 Feb., 1873, m. 30 Dec, 1861. Nancy Smith, b. 21 

Aug., 1834; her res. Waterford, Pa.; had 2 ch., I. Reed S., b. 20 Jan., 
1863, II. Simon S.. b. 21 Apl., 1864. 

79. IV. JAMES M., b. :» June, 1834, d. 24 Feb., 1860. 

80. V. FRANCES K., b. 21 Feb., 1836, d. 20 Aug., 1862, m. Jan., 1859, Clinton Fritts, of 

Waterford, Pa.; had 2 ch., I. James Hunter, b. 2 Nov., 1859; IL Mary 
Frances, b. 2 Nov., 1861, d. July, 1887. 

81. VI. MARTHA J., b. 10 Jan., 1839, m. 16 Jan., 1866, Albert Lamb, of Pleasant- 

ville. Pa. 

82. VII. SIMON STEELE, b. 9 Aug., 1841, d. in Union army, 19 Jan., 1863. 

83. VIIL CELIA L., b. 28 May, 1844, d. 13 Apl., 1863. 

FOURTH GENERATION. 

David Himrod (19) had 10 ch. 

84. I. PHOEBE, b. 32 Sep., 1834. 

85. II. MARIETTA, b. 12 Feb., 1837, d. 11 Apl., 1887, at Neosho Falls, Kansas, where 

her husband lives; m. 9 Sep., 1861, E. S. Woodward, b. 1 May, 1835; he 
served in Union army during Civil war, rose from capt, to col. and 
was brevd. brig.-gen'l for gallantry in the battle of the Wilderness 
where he lost a leg; had 3 ch., I. Hannah, b. 26 Oct., 1862; II. Kate, b. 
26 Jan., 1868; III. Alice, b. 31 Maj% 1870. 

86. III. PATTEN; cashier 1st Natl. Bank of Stirling, Kan.; b. 30 Jan., 1839, m. 

May, 1875, Clara Hawkins, widow. Served as capt. In Ohio regt. duringr 
Civil war— taken prisoner and confined at Columbia, S. C. ; had 1 ch., 
David, b. Mar., 1876. 

87. IV. CHARLES, res. 537 Beldon ave., Chicago, b. 24 Dec. 1841. m. 7 Oct. 1869, Alice F., 

dau. of Wm. Judson, of Waterford, Pa., b. 25 July, 1841; he is a leading 
iron merchant in Chicago, served 3 years in the Union army; has had 
2ch., I. Gertrude, b. 6 Nov., 1871, d. 6 Aug., 1882; II. A Son, b. 17 Aug., 
d. 10 Sep.. 1880. 



668 Ch. of Peter and William Himkod. 

88. V. ANNA, b. 34 Dec., 1843, d. at ChlcajfO. 14 Jan., 1887. 

89. VI. HENRY, b. 31 Jaa., 1846. d. Youngstown. O., 17 Jan., 1877. 

90. VII. KATE, res. Longton, Kan., b. 1.5 July, 1849, ra. 7 Dec.. 1875, Thomaa B. Bigr- 

gers, b. 24 Oct., 18.38; served through the Civil War as major. 

91. VIII. KIKK, of the ttrm of Charles Hiinrod & Co., Iron Merchants, Chicago, 

111,, h. 31 Dec, 1851, ra. 11 Oct., 188.3, Minnie, dau. of Gustave Boehm, 
of Chicago, b. 11 Jan.. 1863; has 2 ch., I. Charles B., b. 16 May, 1885; 

II. Anna Francesca. b. 24 Jan.. 1887. 

92. IX. GERTRUDE, res. Chicago, b. 23 Oct., 1854, ra. 24 Dec, 1878, Thomas A. Hagr- 

erty, of Washington Co., Pa., now with Charles Himrod & Co., b. 
22 Feb., 1849; has 2 ch.. I. Kirk. b. 3 Mch.. 1880; II. Louisa, b. 13 June, 
1882. 

93. X. BERNARD, res. Chicago, with C. Himrod & Co., b. 18 June, 1858. 

FOURTH GENERATION. 

Peter Hinnrod (46) had 8 ch. 

94. I. WILLIAM, res. 230 Union St., Brooklyn, b. 23 ApL, 1814. at Ovid. N. Y.. m. 2 
Sept.. 18.39. Ellen, dau. of William Covenhoven van Home. ^ son of Cor- 
nelius van Home of Centreville. Hunterdon Co., N. J., and a desc. of 
Cornelius Janszen van Hoorne, who d. at New Amsterdam (N. Y.) about 
1693; she b. 20 Sep., 1820. William Himrod commenced his business career 
in 1827 in the store of Herman Camp, at Trumansburg, remaining there 
until 1835, when he established a mercantile business at Ovid, N. Y. ; 
in 1847 he removed to N. Y. city and engaged in the produce commis- 
sion business at No. 3 Water St., he being one of the pioneer merchants 
of the old corn exchange who used to meet daily at 17 South St., an 
association which has since grown to be the N. Y. Pi'oduce Exchange. 
Later he became interested in milling and operated mills in N. Y. c, in 
West Farms and Carthage Landing, N. Y., and in New Brunswick, N. 
J.; for a number of years he was agt. for the Equitable Life Ins. Co. 
of N. Y. and is now special agent for the Hartford Life and Annuity 
Ins. Co. was appd. brigade-inspector of rifle corps, N. Y. S. militia 
in 1836 with rank of major; was deacon for many years in the first 
Presb. church, of Brooklyn, and deacon, elder, and trustree in the 
Westminster Presb. Church of South Brooklyn, also elder of the 84 St. 
Presb. Church. N. Y. C; had 4 ch. 
I. Anna Christina, b. 2 Nov., 1840. 
II. Elizabeth, b. 2 Dec, 1842. 

III. Mary Jeannette, res. 230 Union St., Bkln , b. 16 Nov., 1844, m. N. Y. 

C. by Rev. Dr. Hugh Smith Carpenter, 20 Feb., 1882, Albei-t Jeffer- 
son, son of Williamson W. Dalton of Palatka. Florida, b. 17 Oct., 1843; 
their 1 ch., Ht-nry Himrod, b. 22 Sep., 188.3. We are indebted to Mrs. 
Dalton for this record of the dcscs. of Himrod. Much interesting 
biographical matter that she had carefully collected It has been 
impossible to use for want of space. 

IV. Julia Ellen, res. 20 Irving Place, N. Y. C, b. 6 Aug., 1847, ra. N. Y. C. 

by Rev. Dr. Hugh Smith Carpenter, .31 Oct., 1882, Josiah, son of 
Samuel Quincy, of Boston, Mass., b. 22 Aug., 1844; has been for 
many years an importer of decorative pottery. 

95. II. JOHN McMATH, b. 10 May, 1816, d. 24 Nov., 1822. 

96. III. LOUISA McMATH, b. 29 Apl., 1818, d. 8 Nov., 1818. 

97. IV. CHARLES, res. Lodi, N. Y., b. 15 July, 1830, m. Jirst, 15 Feb., 1849, Deborah, 

dau. of Michael Biggs, of Trumansburg. N. Y., b. 6 Nov., 1824, d. at 
Tekonsha, Mich., 22 Aug., 1849, m. second, 4 Jan., 185.3. Margaret, dau. 
of James Hill, b. 1 June, 1829; had 3 ch., I. Ida Deborah, res. Ithaca, 
N. Y., b. 27 June, 1854; II. Ella Jane, res. Ithaca, N. Y., b. 2 Aug., 1863; 

III. Wm. Cornelius, b. 31 May, 1865. 

96. V. OLIVER WM., b, 26 June, 1822, d. 22 Oct., 1881, at Alameda, Cal.. m. 19 Aug., 
1850, Mary J., dau. of Lyman Crutlenden, b. 8 Sep., 1825; her res. Ala- 
meda. (?al. He removed to the Pacific slope in 1849 where he operated 
in mines and grain, being associated with Mills, Freidlander & Co. 
While on a sick-bed in 1874 he elal>orated a new system of book-keep- 
ing which he afterwards copyrighted and successfully introduced in 



Ch. of Peter & David W. Himrod & G. Robertson. 669 

business houses in Cal. ; had 1 ch., I. Harriet Ellen, b. Dec., 1854, d. 26 
Mch.. 1855. 
99. VI. JANE DeMOTT, res. Worcester, Mass., b. 4 Apl., 1834, m. 17 Aug., 1844, 
Georg-e Robertsou, of N. Y. C. b. 21 Apl., 1809, had 4 ch„ 

I. Martha Jane, res. Worcester, Mass., b. 18 July, 1844, m. 4 May, 1871, 

John F. Warner, of Jamesport, L. I., b. 6 June, 1840. 
II. Ellen Himrod, res. 44 Morgan St., Buffalo, N. Y., b. 24 Mch.. 1846, m. 
20 Jan., 1869, John H. Mcintosh, of Cayuga, N. Y., b. 26 Mch., 1845; 
have 2 ch., C?iai-les H., b. 24 Dec, 1870, John Henry, b. 11 Dec, 1873. 

III. Cecilia Elizabeth, res. Corning, N. Y., b. 2 Dec, 1849, m. 10 Nov., 

1875, Daniel F. Chandler, of Trumansburg, N. Y., b. 22 Nov., 1848; 
had 2 ch., William Ji., b. and d. 10 Feb., 1879, and George, b. and d. 
29 June, 1880. 

IV. William Peter, res. 74 Clinton Place, N. Y. C, b. 1 Sep., 1853, m. 29 

Dec, 1881, Mary Elizabeth Shea, dau. of Robert Montgomery, of 
N. Y. C, b. 5 June, 1857; their 3 ch., Robert Deemes, b. 1.3 Dec, 1882; 
Grace Marion, b. 2 May, 1885; Eaith, b. 23 May, 1888. 
V. James Oliver, b. 22 May, 1857, d. 15 Mch., 1858. 
VI. George Wharton, res. Worcester, Mass., b. 30 July, 1863. 
100. VII. PETER, b. 28 Feb., 1834, d. 6 Apl., 1887, m. 9 Jan., 1861, Amaletta, dau. of 
Michael B. Ellison, of Lodi, N. Y., b. 28 Dec, 1836, her res. N. Y. C. 
For 10 years he suffered from asthma; among the many remedies he 
used he formulated one which he manufactured under the name of 
Himrod's Asthma Cure, and about 1872 he, in connection with Col. S. 
R. Pinliuey, founded the " Himrod Manufacturing Co." at 1 Park 
Row, now at Fulton and Church Sts., N. Y. C; had 1 ch., Fred, b. 4 
Apl., 1866. 

101. VIII. JAMES, b. 25 Jan.. 183G, d. at Alameda, Cal., 13 Nov., 1878, m. at Sacra- 

mento, Cal., 27 Sep., 1870, Jane Eliza, dau. of David M. Cowdrey, of N. 
Y., b. 22 Oct., 1834, d. 26 June, 1886, from injuries received on 23rd, by 
being strucli by a locomotive in attempting to cross the track on the 
way to church at Passaic, N. J. He enlisted 24 Aug., 1861, in Co. A, 40th 
Reg. N. Y. S. v., served with his regt. throughout the war participat- 
ing in many engagements in South Carolina, Georgia, and before 
Richmond, Va., rose through the successive non-commissioned gradef 
to be second lieut. ranking from 4 Apl., 1864 and first lieut. ranking 
from 16 Aug., 1864; had 2 ch. 
I. Mabel Cowdrey, res. 230 Union St., Brooklyn, N. Y., b. 18 Dec, 1871. 

II. Hugh Carpenter, res. 230 Union St., Brooklyn, N. Y., b. 10 Aug., 1874. 

FOURTH GENERATION. 
David W. Himrod (53) had 8 ch. 

102. I. WILLIAM GIBSON, res. Philadelphia, Pa., b. 26 May, 1834, m. first. May, 

18.57, Elsie A. Newkirk, of Musquaka, Iowa, b. 1840 d. 8 July, 1869; m. 
second, 29 Mch., 1871, Electa Ann, dau. of Lewis S. Smith, of Cazenovia, 
N. Y., had 4 ch. 
I. Mary Grace, b. 3 Aug., 1858, m. 3 Sep., 1878, William Emerson Watklns, 
of Hyde Park, Pa., b. 14 Dec, 1856. 

II. Stella Josephine P., b. 4 June, 186I, m. 4 Apl., 1886, Daniel R. Wat- 

kins; their l ch., Thomas Branson, b. 1886. 

III. Sarah Maria, b. and d. 1865. 

IV. Elizabeth Christine, b. 14 Feb., 1868. 

103. II. LOINE LAMAR, res. Rochester, N. Y., b. 3 Mch., 183G, m. 19 Sep., 1861, Caro- 

line B., dau. of Philemon Thompson, of Trumansburg, N. Y., b. 2 Apl., 
1842; had2ch. 
I. Philemon H., b. 6 Dec, 1863, d. 17 Apl., 1876. 

II. Anna Belle, res. Rochester, N. Y., b. 5 Dec, 1865, m. 21 Mch., 1889, 
Charles E. Chapman. 

104. III. EDWARD McLALLEN, b. 1 Oct., 1837, d. at Trumansburg, N. Y., 18 May, 

1887; Editor of the Trumansburg News, City Editor of the Dally Demo- 
crat, Scranton, Pa., and was afterwards on the staff of the Scranton 
Morning Republican; was an officer of the Penn. State Senate 1877-8, 
and altogether was a man highly esteemed for his ability in his pro- 
fession and for his many sterling qualties of heart. 



670 Godfrey Melick of Warren Co., N. J. 

105. IV. PETER SUTPHEN, b. 10 June, 1839, d. 5 June. 1840. 

lOtl. v. SARAH ELIZABETH, b. 19 June, 1R43, d. 1 Feb., 1844. 

107. VI. SARAH MARIA, b. 19 Mch., 1847, d. 6 Feb.. 1859. 

108. VII. LADRATAYLOR, b. 20Sep., 1849, d. lOOct., 1849. 

109. VIII. CHRISTINE, res. Philadelphia, Pa., b. 11 Mch., 18.59, m. 22 Aug., 1822. 

Conway P. H. Day, b. 28 June, 1838, Bristol, Eng'd, d. 10 July, 18«9. 
at Trumansburg', N. Y,; have 3 ch., 

I. MARJORIE, b. 25 Aug., 1883. 

II. Haighington Himrod, b. Dec, 1884. 
in. Stella Himrod. b. 28 Dec., 1886. 



JOHANN GOTTFRIED MOELICH (B). 
(Godfrey Melick, of 'Warren Co., N. J., and His Descendants.) 

1. JOHANN GOTTFRIED MOELICH was the youngest son of Johann Wilhelm 
(XXVI) and Anna Catherine, of Bendorf on the Rhine, Germany, where 
he was born in 1724, and baptised in the Evang-elical Head-Church by the 
Rev. Joh. Georg Schmidt, the baptismal certificate reading: "The 
14th of July, 1724, to Joh. Wilhelm Molich a son was born and baptized 
on the following Sunday; his witnesses of baptism were Gottfried 
Knebel, a child of a citizen of this place, but who migrated soon after- 
ward; Johann Anthon Kirberger, Master Hans Wilhelm Kirberger's 
son. Master Johann Banthel's eldest daughter Cathrina and has been 
given to him the name Johann Gottfried." (See p. 71.) The 
father of godmother Cathrine Banthels had been the pastor of the 
Evangelical Head-Church and the predecessor of the Rev. Johannes 
Reusch, who was installed in 1697. Godfrey Melick, as he was known 
in America, emigrated from Germany in 1735 with Johannes (A) 
landing at Philadelphia, 29 May. from ship Mercury. He remained a 
member of Johannes family until 1747, when he removed to Green- 
wich Tp., Sussex now Warren Co.. N. J., where he permanently settled 
on land that had been purchased for him during his minority and 
whore he d. 11 Sep., 1776. He married 20 May. 1748, Mai'garet, dau. of 
Christian Falkenberger b. 2 Feb., 1733, d. 26 Sep.. 1799. After his death 
his widow m. a Tomer by whom one son John who d. at Orangeville. 
Columbia Co., Pa., about 184u, leaving a widow Hester. (See pp. 25, 
50, 74. 5C1.) 

SECOND GENERATION (B). 

Godfrey Melick (i) had lo ch. 
2. I. GODFREY, b. 24 Mch., 1749, d. 23 Jan., 1777, m. and had one son, Samuel Wil- 

LET. 

8. II. CHRISTOPHER, b. 1 Dec, 1750, d. 15 Feb., 1832, m. Mary, dau. of Matthias 
Shipman, b. 22 Sep.. 1754. d. 11 Feb.. 18.36, both bur. in St. James Luth. 
Ch. yd.. Philipsburg. N. J. Matthias Shipman came from Saybrook, 
Conn., and settled in Lopatcong tp.. Warren Co.. N. J., his homestead 
being now (1888) occupied by his gr. -grandson William; during our 
Revolution he was Col. of 1st Sussex regt. For his 12 ch. see p. 671 

4. III. WILLIAM, b. 9 Mch., 1753, d. 27 Apl., 1808, m, Zuriah Kent, d. 6 May, 1847; at 
outset of Revolution he was a loyalist and entered the British army 
in which he served as sergeant throughout the war, receiving a bullet 
in the shoulder which he carried until his death. In 1783 he settled at 
St. John, N. B., Can., where he became prominent in business and 
social circles, and at his death owned the most extensive tannery in 
the city. (See Chap. XXXVl). For his 8 ch. see p. 672. 



l^' 



Ch. of John Hulshizer, John Fine & Chris. Melick. 671 

5. rV. JACOB, b. 3 Jan., 1755, d. 20 Feb., 1832, buried in Briar Creek Cemetery in 

Columbia Co., Pa. ; m. 30 July, 1781, Sarah Laycock, b. 23 May, 1T60, d. 
17 Mar., 1812. He owned and lived on a farm near Bloomsbury, Hun- 
terdon Co., N. J., until Feb., 1811, when he purchased from the heirs 
of John Pringle 314 acres near Bloomsburg, Col. Co., Pa., paying there- 
for $2990. upon which he lived till his death. For his 10 ch. see p. 672. 

6. V. MARY MARGARET, b. 20 Aug., 1757, d. 25 Feb., 1822. m. John Martin, young- 

est son of Martin Hulshizer, who emigrated from Germany between 
1750 and 1760, b. 18 Jan., 1747, d. 9 ApL, 1810; had ch., I. Catharine, b. 
14 Sept., 1775, d. 17 March, 1853, m. Samuel Drake; II. Godfrey, b. 9 
June, 1778, d. 3 March, 1858, m. Margaret Hix; III. Martin, b. 2 Feb. ,1781, 
d. 19 Jan., 1862, m. Anna C. Sharp; IV. Margaret, b. 6 Dec, 1783, d. 27 
May. 1866, m. William Smith; V. William, b. 23 Sept., 1786, d. 16 Dec, 
1852, m. Hester Heller; VI. Hannah, b. 20 March, 1789, d. 17 Feb., 18G5, m. 
John Duckworth ; VII. John, b. 24 Jan., 1792, dec ; VIII. Mary, b. 16 ApL, 
1794, d. 17 Sept., 1827, m. Peter Tinsman; IX. Daniel, b. 15 Feb., 1797, d. 
2 Dec, 1881, m. Margaret Carpenter, he was a prominent citizen of 
Warren Co., and an elder of Greenwich Pres. Ch., his son Doctor 
P. F. Hulshizer, is now resident physician, at Stewartsville, in that 
Co.; X. Andrew, b. 29 Jan., 1800, d. 12 ApL, 1883, m. Lena Sharp; XI* 
James, b. 22 March, 1803, d. 10 Oct., 1879, m. Lydia Austen. 

7. VI. HENRY, twin, b. 3 Dec, 1751, d. 9 ApL, 1859, m. 5 ApL, 1781, Rebecca, dau. of 

James Stewart, b, 10 March, 1762, d. 27 Jan., 1835. Both bur. in St. 
James' Luth. Chyd., Phillipsburg, N. J. For his 11 ch. see p. 673. 

8. Vn. ANDREW, twin, b. 3 Dec, 1759, d. 18 Nov., 1843, m. 11 Dec, 1785, in St. James 

Luth. Ch. at Philipsburg, N. J., Catharine Crumline, b. 1 Dec, 1764, d. 
11 July, 1839. He lived and died in the forks of Big and Little Fishing 
creeks near Bloomsburg, Col. Co., Penna. For his 8 ch. see p. 673. 

9. Vni. JOHN, b. 15 April, 1762, d. 6 May, 1856, m. Mary, dau. of Joseph Beck, b. in 

Phila., 31 Jan., 1777, d. 19 April, 1857. In 1783 he removed with William 
(4) to St. John, N. B., though not forced to do so, as had been his 
loyalist brother. For his 9 ch. see p. 674. 

10. IX. CATHARINE, b. 17 Jan., 1765, d. 29 Jan., 1846, m. 5 Sept., 1784, Philip Fine, 

b. 18 ApriL 1763, d. 14 Aug., 1834; had ch., I. John, b. 22 Aug., 1785; II. 
William, b. 7 Sept., 1787; III. Philip, IV. Godfrey, b. 8 June, 1792, d. 
5 June, 1819; V. Margaret, VI. Maria, b. 6 June, 1796; VII. Jacob, b. 
26 Aug., 1800; VIII. Christopher, b. 15 Aug., 1803. All their children 
bap. in St. James Luth. Ch., Philipsburg, N. J. John Fine was an 
elder in that church. 

THIRD GENERATION (B). 
Christopher Melick (3) had 12 ch. 

11. I. GODFREY, b. 2 May, 1774. 

12. II. WILLIAM, b. 13 Dec, 1775, d. 24 Feb., 1841, unm., bur. in St. James Luth. 

chyd., Philipsburg, N. J. 

13. III. MATTHIAS, b. 6 June, 1778, d. 5 March. 1819, bur. in St. James Luth. chyd.. 

Philipsburg, N. J. ; m. 22 May, 1806, Hannah, dau. of Andrew Malick 
(A 4); hadch., L Catharine, b. 7 ApL, 1809. 
II. Margaretta S., b. 27 June, 1811. 

14. IV. MARGARET, b. 6 June, 1780. 

15. V. JACOB, b. 17 July. 1782, d. 1 April, 1819, bur. in St. James Luth. chyd., 

Philipsburg, N. J.; m. Mary, dau. of Jacob Sharp. 

16. VI. JOHN, b. 5 Nov., 1784, d. 30 July, 1855, unm., in consequence of falling from 

a load of hay, bur. in St. James Luth. chyd., Philipsburg, N. J. 

17. VII. SARAH, b. 30 Jan., 1787, m. 16 Feb., 1809, John, son of Andrew (A 4.) 

18. VIII. CHRISTOPHER, b. 14 May, 1789, d. in infancy. 

19. IX. MARY, twin, b. 14 May, 1789. 

20. X. SAMUEL, b. 13 ApL, 1793, d. 11 May, 1832, m. 3 Jan., 1816, Sarah Hunt, b. 18 

June, 1798, d. 9 Jan., 1878. For his 8 ch. see p. 675. 

21. XI. ELIZABETH, b. 20 ApL, 1796. 

22. XII. ISAAC, b. 11 Dec, 1798, d. 26 ApL, 186J, bur. in St. James' Luth. Chyd.. 

Phillipsburg, N. J. 



672 Cii. OF William and Jacob Melick and John Hay. 

THIRD GENERATION (B). 
William Melick (4) had 7 ch. 

23. I. MARGARET, b. 3 May, 1794, d. 24 Mch., 1860, at Loch Lomond, Co. of St. 

John, Canada, m. 12 Dec, 1811, John Jordan, b. 28 Mch., 1790, d. 24 Feb., 
1863, at Fredericton, N. B., Can. ; for 18 year8 he represented his city 
and CO. in the lej^rislature. For their 11 ch. see p. 675. 

24. n. SARAH, b. 3 May, 1795, d. 7 Dec, 1845, m. 10 Aug.. 1816, Nathan Reed, a sail- 

malier, at Woolwich, Maine, b. 29 Sep., 1791, d. at sea. For their 4 ch., 
see p. 67G. 

25. III. DAVID, b. 1707, d. in infancy. 

26. IV. WILLIAM GODFREY, b. 1799, d. C Aug., 1834, unra. 

27. V. ELIZABETH, b. 1801, d. 7 Aujf., 1883, unm. 

28. VI. RACHEL JANE, b. 1803, d. Oct., 1848, m. James Farler, had 3 ch., I. Annie, 

m. George Squires; II. Melick, m. Margaret Sentell ; III. James, m. 
Annie DeForest. 

29. VII. MARY, b. 26 Jan., 1806, d. Nov., 1884, m. Thomas Plummer, had 4 ch. 

I. Mary C, dec, m. William Plummer, of N. Y., and had 3 sons. 
n. Sophia, d. May, 1SS6, m. Israel Hawes, had 2 ch. 

III. Thomas, m. Rhena Braten, had one ch. ; residence in N. Y. 

IV. Alice, m. James Sinclair, had one ch. 

30. VII. HULDAH, b. 15 May, 1808, d. 18 Jan., 1887, m. John Hay, of St. John, N. B., 

Canada, b. 23 May, 1804, d. 30 March, 1860; had ch. ; I. Cecilia A., res. St. 
John, N. B.; II. Maria V., res. St. John, N. B. ; III. Albert S., res. 
St. John, N. B., jeweller, m. Jennie K., dau. of Leonard Weeks, their 
ch., Ella A., Charles L., Morton M., dec, and Clara C. ; IV. George A. 
F., res. French Village, N. B., farmer, m. Emma J. Fowler; their ch., 
Alberta M., dec, Louis D., and Grace C; V. John M., res. St. John, N. 
B., jeweller, m. Fi-ances M., dau. of John S. Kowe; VI. George F., dec. 

THIRD GENERATION (B.) 

Jacob Melick (5) had 10 ch. 

31. I. JACOB, b. 19 Nov., 1781, d. 21 Nov., 1847, m. 10 Oct., iSll, Lydia. dau. of Jesse 

Barber, b. 13 Oct., 1794, d. 12 April, 1879. Lived at New Village, N. J. 
For 15 ch see p. 676. 

32. II. ELIZABETH, b. 11 Dec, 1783, d. 22 Dec, 1853, at Light Street, Penna., unm. 

33. III. JOHN, b. 9 Apl., 1780, d. 7 Feb., 1827, m. Hannah, dau. of Peter Van Bus- 

kirk, b. 12 May, 1790, d. in Ohio 17 Dec, 1876, had 4 ch. 
1. Martha Matilda, res. Shenandoah, Richland Co., O., b. 31 Jan., 1815, 
ra. 27 Dec, 1832, Jacob Creveling, b. 3 Nov., 1811, d. Oct., 1878; had 7 
ch., but 2 of whom matured, viz: WilUani F., b. 5 Jan., 18;S, d. Oct., 
1876, m. 1863, Harriet Miller; and Andrew W., b. 11 Jan., 1841, ra. 
Zarada Burns. 
II. RoSETTA, b. 21 Sep., 1822, d. 9 Jan., 1861. m. 184.3, John Oman, b. 1818, d. 
June, 1884; their 7 ch., IsaiaJi, 6. in infancy, Alfred, Alexander, 
William, Oscar, Mary Jane, res. Shlloh, O., m. Thomas Hynter, and 
John S. 

III. Jane, d. in Infancy. 

IV. Jacob, b. 1825, d. 1858, m. Sarah Ann Swan; their 3 ch., Martha, who m. 

James McCoy, Mary Ella and Sarah Ann, who m. Laman Hocken, 
and lives at Pern, Nehama Co., Neb. 

34. IV. MARGARET, b. 29 Nov. 1788, d. at Salona, Pa., 18.32, m. George Gilbert; had 

3 ch., I. Jacob, II. Sarah, III. Elizabeth. 

35. V. MARY, b. 7 Feb., 1791, m. 24 Aug., 1815, Jonathan Agler; no ch. 

36. VI. CATHERINE, b. 24 May, 1793, d. 25 Feb., 1818, m. Samuel Bright, and left 

one son. 

37. VII. REBECCA, b. 23 Apl., 1795, d. 21 Nov., 1815, ra. 29 Dec, 1814, William, son of 

Abra. Willet; no ch. 

38. VIII. HENRY, b. 13 July, 1797, d. 25 Oct., 1798. 

39. IX. WILLIAM, b. 2 Sept., 1799, d. 23 Nov., 1829, unra. 

40. X. DANIEL, b. 28 Nov., 1801, d. 2 Aug., 1866, ra. 13 Feb., 1823, Jlrst, Mary Magda- 

line, dau. of Philip Weller. b. 3 Oct., 1802, d. 30 Aug., 1S47 ; m. second, 
17 Oct., 1848, Margaret, dau. of Josiah McClure, b. 17 June, 1804. For his 
9 ch. see p. 077. 



Children of Henry and Andrew Melick (twins). 673 
third generation (b). 

Henry Melick (7) had ch. 

41. I. JAMES, b. 14 Aug.. 1781, d. 18 Oct., 1848, m. Rebecca Catharine Smith, b. 17 

Sep., 1782, d. 3 Aug., 1873; bur. in St. James' Luth. Ch. yd., Phillips- 
burg, N. J. For bis 7 ch. see p. 078. 

42. II. WILLIAM, b. 18 May, 1783, d. 18 Mch., 1787. 

43. in. JOHN, b. 16 Aug., 1785, d. 4 Nov., 181.5; bur. in St. James' Ch. yd. : m. Eliza- 

beth Huselton; had 3 ch., I. Hannah; II. Henry; III. Jane, 

44. IV. GODFREY, b. 10 Dec, 1787, d. 3 Mch., 1870, m. Sarah, dau. of Abraham 

Hance, b. 2G Jan., 1797, d. 3 Dec, 1805; had 8 ch. 
I. Abraham, res. Stewartsville, Warren Co., N. J., b, 38 Mch., 1818, m. 

Elmira, dau. of John Snyder. 
II. Mary, res. Stewai-tsville, b. 7 Aug-., 1820, unm. 

III. James H.. res. Stewartsville, b. 22 May, 1823, m. Ann, dau. of Spencer 

Carter. 

IV. Margaret, b. 1834, d. 1831, 

V. Henry H., b. 24 Mch., d. in 1803, after serving in Civil War, m. Mary 

Knaup, her res. Easton, Pa. 
VI. Peter M., res. Newark, N. J., b. 19 Oct., 1830, ra. Mary E. Smith. 
VII. John H., res. Stewartsville, N. J., b. 28 Aug, 18.33, m. Elizabeth, dau. of 

Basil Linn. 
VIII. Sara« a., res. Stewartsville, N. J., b. 20 Jan., 18.37, ra. Henry Frey. 

45. V. JACOB, b. 23 Dec, 1789, d. 1 Apl., 1881, m. Mary Sign, b. 10 Oct., 1813; had 4 ch., 

I. Rebecca; II. John; III. Mary; IV. William. 

46. VI. WILLIAM S., b. 23 March, 1793, d. 14 Jan., 1834, m. Hannah Sharp, b. in 

March, 1797, d. 23 April, 1868; both bur. in St. James' Luth. chyd. ; had 
ch., I. John, II. Christopher, III. James, IV. Catharine. 

47. Vli. REBECCA, b. 11 Aug., 1794, m. Peter Tinsmau; had 1 ch., b. 10 July, 1816, 

d. in Infancy. 

48. VIII. MARGARET, b. 24 Dec, 1797, m. John Mutchler; had ch., I. George, b. 

3 April, 1818, d. in March, 1869; II. Henry M., b. in Nov., 1819; III. 
Eleanor, b. 3i Dec, 1821, d. 22 Feb., 1886; IV. Valentine, b. 28 Feb., 
18-i3; V. Jacob, b. 8 May, 1825; VI. John, b. 4 April, 1827; VII. Rebecca 
Jane, b. in Feb., 1829, m. G. W. Clindumd; VIII. William, res. Easton, 
Pa., b. 21 Dec, 1831; IX. James, b. 8 May, 1833, d. in Jan., 1887; X. God- 
frey, b. 4 May, 1836, dec. 

49. IX. JANE, b. 28 March, 1799, m. William Person; had ch., I. Christianne, II, 

Jacob, III. Rebecca, IV. Henry, V. Charlotte, VI. Hugh, VII. 
Josephine. 

50. X. SARAIL. b. 20 Oct., 1802, m. Peter Bloom; hadch., I. William, IT. Rebecca, 

III. Abraham, IV. Catharine, V. John, VI. Ervin. 

51. XI. ELEANOR, b. 29 Oct., 1804, m. William White, now living near Colum- 

bus, O. 

THIRD GENERATION (B). 

Andrew Melick (8) had 8 ch. 

52. 1. ELIZABETH, b. 8 Aug., 1780, d. 6 Apr., 1870, m. in 1803, Joseph Crawford, b. 

in 1778; d. 27 Sept., 1844; had ch. I. Catharine, b. 20 Dec, 1804; II. 
Edmond, b. 3 Oct, 1806; III. Andrew, b. 23 Feb., 1809; IV. John, b. 11 
Feb., 1811; V. Mary, b. 3 Dec. 1813; VI. Hannah, b. 27 July, 1815; VII. 
Joseph, b. 25 Sept., 181S, res. OrangevlUe, Columbia Co., Pa., m. 
Catharine, dau. of Harraan Labaw, b. 22 June, 1822, d. 19 June, 1875, 
had ch., Clinton, Elizabeth, John, Harmon, William, Alfred, Joseph, 
ReDecca and Mary; VIII. Catharine, J., b. 8 Aug., 1821; IX. Eliza- 
beth, b. 15 July, 1824; X. Stephen, b. 9 May, 1827; XI. Sarah Ann, b. 
22 March, 1830. 

53. II. JOHN, b. 13 Mch., 1778, d. 31 Aug., 1847, m. Sarah Conner, b. 6 June, 1791, d, 23 

Aug., 1843; had 2 ch. 

I. Andrew, b. Mar., 1815, d. Nov., 1805, m. Feb., 1833, Sarah White; their 7 

. ch., John; Elisha; Ilenrv, res. Camba, Mt. Pleasant, Pa., m. 1866, 

Louisa Krouse and has 3 ch., Caroline, Esther and Rose; Andrew, 

b. 1849, d. in infaucv; David H'.: I'eter, res. Camba, m. Anna Howell 

43 



674 Ch. of Jno. Melick, J. H. Vaxdeuslice, W. Leavitt. 

and, has C ch., Henry, Charles, Willets, Peter, John and Esther; 
Murfjaret, res. Orangeville, Pa., m. Henry Melick, and has 1 ch., 
Laura Esther. 
II. Esther Ann, res. Bloomsburtf, Col. Co., Pa., b. 6 June, 1817, m. David 
Stroup, b. 18 July, 1809, d. 18 Auff., 1844; no ch. 
54. ni. ANDREW, b. 28 Mch.. 1790, d. 11 Mch., 1868, in. 5 Jan., 1816, Sarah Besht, b. 

26 Sep., 179-1, d. 3 Aug-., 1851. For his 7 ch. see p. 679. 
r.5. IV. WILLIAM, b. IHl.J, d. Nov., 1885, unm. 

56. V. STEPHEN, b. 27 May, 1«00, d. ;50 ApL, 1857, m. 30 Apl., 1830, Sarah, dau. of 

Peter Melick, b. 10 Nov., 1802, d. 10 Feb., 1848; lived and died in Luzerne 
Co., Pa. For his 7 ch. see p. G79. 

57. VI. CATHARINE, b. 25 Dec, 1H02, d. 5 Oct., 18G5, ra. 1 May, 1824, John Hiester 

Vanderslice, b. 9 Aug, 1805, d. 29 Oct., 1874; had ch., I. Rebecca Ann, b. 
in Dec, 1824, m. in Jan., 1851, Jackson Howcr, b. in June, 1828, res. 
Bloorasburj?, Col. Co., Pn. ; II. Henry Wii,i,iam, res. lUooinsburg, Col. 
Co., Pa.; II. Tacy Elizabeth, b. 21 Mch., is:i5. m. lo Feb., 1857, 
John M. White, res. Light St., Col. Co., Pa., b. 30 Dec, 1833; have 
3 boys and 2 girls, all living; IV. Hannah Hellena, m. James 
M. Salmon, res. Bangor, Northampton Co., Pa.; V. John Heister, b. 
23 Aug., 1840. m. 2 July, 18(52, Eliza Jane White, b. 7 Mch, 1841, res. Milan, 
Rock Island Co., 111.; VI. Sarah Susanna; VII. Harriet M., b. 16 
July, 1854, d. 22 Apl., 1883. 

58. VII. GODFREY, b. 31 Dec, 1805, d. Feb., 1878, m. first, 1835, Susan, dau. of Har- 

mon Kline, m. second, 1850, Caroline Jacoby, b. 1 April, 1825, d. 18 Mar., 

1885. For his 8 ch. see p. 680. 
no. VIII. HENRY, b. 11 Nov., 1808, in Col. Co., Pa., d. 9 July, 1877, in Richland Co., 

O., to which place he removed in 1837, m. 12 Apr., 1832, Ohristiane, dau. 

of Wm. Roseberry; had 1 ch. 
I. Andrew, res. Plymouth, Richland Co., O., b. 11 Nov., 1838, m. 12 Nov., 
1850, Fi-aaces Elizabeth, dau. of Ephraim Hart. Andrew Melick 
served in Civil war in 4.5th Reg. O. V. I. from 22 Aug., 1802, to 3 
Julj', 1805; has9ch., Henry Ephraim, b. 9 Nov., 1870; Hilana Llew- 
eUyn, b. 14 Dec, 1871; Settle, b. 28 Jan., 1873; Philip Hayes, b. 8 Oct., 
1875; AiuJreii: WilUarcl, h. 29 Aug., 1877; Jason Forster, b. 22 Feb., 
1879; LoisiaeU,\>. 1 Sept., 1880; Mary Elsie, b. 3 Oct., 1882; ADram. 
Lloya, b. 20 Dec, 1883; Daisy Myrtle, b. 26 Jan., 1886. 

THIRD GENERATION (B.) 
John Melick (g) had 9 ch. 

00. I. WILLIAM BECK, b. 18 June, 17fl4, d. 21 June 1832, m. Mary Vail, b. about 

1800, d. 17 Aug., 1827, leaving 1 sou, I. William Nagle. 
61. II. HENRY, res. St. John, N. B., Canada, b. 26 Jan., 1796, m. Isabella, dau. of 

Lawrence Forster, b. C June, 1811O, d. 27 July, 1884; no ch. 
C2. III. JANE, b. 14 Mch., IVOts, d. 2b Jan., 1883, m. Wm. Leavitt. merchant of St. 
John, N. B., Can., b. 19 Mch., 1790. d. 2 June, 1880, had 6 ch. 
I. John, d. 1879, unm. 
II. Jane Caroline, res. 7 Doi'chester St., St. John, N. B., Can. 

III. Maky Gbandon, res. 7 Dorchester St., St. John. N. B„ Can., \n. first 

Alfred L. Busly, d. 1862, by whom 2 ch.. Win. Leavitt, &na Mary T.; 
m. second Wm. Hogg, of Grangemouth, Scotland, d. 1876, by whom 
no ch. 

IV. William Henry, res. 16 Craig-y-don Parade, Llandudno, N. Wales, b. 

June, 1829; m. first Annie Gorst, dau. of I'hilip Crellin, of Liver- 
pool, Eng., dec, by whom 2 ch., Annie Jane, res. 45 Osborne Road, The 
Brook, lavcrpool. Eng., b. 10 Oct., 18.54, m. George John Hancock; 
Margaret Alice, b. 18 May, 1850, unm; Wm. Henry Leavitt, m. second, 
10 Feb., 1868, on the Island of Toboga, Elizabeth, dau. of Wm. Wan- 
stall, by whom 4 ch., Mary Elizabeth, b. I'i July, 1S(,'); Maud Pea- 
bodij, b. 3 Feb., 1876; Blanche Eleanor Louise, b. 23 Feb., 1880; Jessie, 
b. 30 July. 1882. 
V. James Hay, res. 88 Mj-rtle St., Liverpool, G. B., m. 'l870, Isabella Mc- 
Auley, had 3 ch., Barbara, James and Jatie, all dec. 
VI. Clarence, res. 7 Dorchester St., St. John, N. B., Can. 



Ch. of Henry Fotherby, Samuel Melick, J. Jokdan. 675 

63. IV. JOHN, b. 13 Apr., 1800, d. 31 Aug-., 1870, m. Anne Durland. 

64. V. JAMES GODFREY, b. 24 May, 1802, d. 8 May. 1885, m. first, a dau. of Daniel 

Smith, of St. John, N. B., who d. in childbirth, the infant surviving- 
but two days; m. second, 15 Feb., 1834, Caroline M., dau. of William 
Fairweather, of Millstream, N. B., b. 17 Aug-., 1807, d. 11 Feb., 1888. 
James Godfrey Melicli was a .ieweler at St. John, N. B., for upwards of 
40 years; retiring from business in 1864, he purchased a residence at 
Hampton, N. B., where he resided until his death. For his 7 ch. see p. 
680. 

65. VI. CHARLES JOSEPH, b. 16 Nov., 1806, d. 19 May, 1873, ra. Margaret, dau. of 

Lawrence Foster, b. 2 Sept.. 1805, d. in Nov,. 1866. 

66. VII. GEORGE, b. 13 Sept., 1813, d. 14 Oct., 1820. 

67. VIII. MARY ANN, b. 5 Sept., 1816, m. Henry Fotherby, of Waliefield, Yorlishire, 

Eng., merchant, b. 12 Dec, I8l4, d. 15 Aug., 1866; had 4 ch., I. Henrt, 
d. in Yorkshire. Eng., 10 Jan., 1881; II. William Leavitt, d. in in- 
fancy; III. Eliza Priestley, unm.; IV. Mary, unm. 

68. IX. MARGARET SOPHIA, b. 14 Mch., 1820, d. 2 Aug., 1820. 

FOURTH GENERATION (B.) 

Samuel Melick (ao) had 8 ch. 

69. I. WILLIAM HUGHES, b. -21 Dec, 1816, d. -20 Mch., 1877, m. 15 Mch., 1838, Mary, 

dau. of John Coe, of Havcrstraw, N. Y., b. 6 Jan., 1817. For his 5 ch. 
see p. 680. 

70. II. JOHN HUGHES, b. 22 June, 1818, d. 10 Oct., 1855, at Clayton City, Iowa, m. 5 

Apl., 1841, Rebecca J. Posten, b. 20 Nov., 1820, d. 13 Feb., 1888 at Wash- 
ington, N. J. For his 8 ch. see p. 681. 

71. III. MATTHIAS, b. 1 June, 1820, d. 29 Oct., 1859. 

7-2. rV. MARY ELIZABETH, b. 9 Aug., 1822. d. 13 Sep., 1827. 

73. V. CHRISTOPHER, b. 5 Oct., 1824, d. 10 Nov. 1827. 

74. VI. MARTHA MOORE, b. 9 Feb.. 1827, m. 18 Mch., 18.52, to the Rev. Joshua H. 

Turner' b. 14 May, 1820, d. 19 Feb., 1867; res. Wilmington, Del.; had ch., 
I. Althea, b. 6 June, 1853, m. 2 July, 1873, to H. A. Bradfteld. res. Bris- 
tol, Pa.; had ch., Martha M., b. 6 Feb., 1875; Edna, b. 16 Jan., 1881; II. 
Sarah Elizabeth, b. Feb. 3, 1857, d. 18 July. 1859; III. Eleanor 
Myers, b. 21 Oct., 1859, m. 3U June, 1887, Fred. Willmont Fenu; res. 
Wilmington, Del. 

75. VII. SAMUEL, res. Stroudsburg, Pa., b. 8 E'eb., 1829, m. 9 June, 1851, Eliza- 

beth Phillips; for many years he was leading jeweller at Newburg, N. 
Y., from which place he removed in 1889; had 10 ch., I. Mary 
Ella, b. 31 Aug.. 18.'>2; II. John Hughes, b. 15 Aug., 1854; IIL 
William M., b. 4 Sep., 1856, d. 5 Nov., 1861; IV. Lewis P., b. 15 Oct., 1858; 
. V. Martha J., b. 6 Aug., i860; VI. Edward P., b. 16 Mch., 1863; VIL 
Henry, b. 28 Mch., 1865, d. 8 Mch., 1872; VIII. Nettie Hunt, b. 28 Oct., 
1867, d. 4 Sep., 1871; IX. Anna P., b. 11 Dec, 1868, d. 30 July, 1875; X. 
Samuel D., b. 3 Dec, 1872. 

76. VIII. JOSEPH, b. 15 Apl., 1831, d. 8 Sep., 1882. 

FOURTH GENERATION (B). 

John and Margaret (Melick) Jordan (23) had 11 ch. 

77. I. JANE, b. 27 Oct., 1812, d. May, 1838, m. in 1834, Robert Roberts, of St. 

Andrews, N. B., Canada, had 2 ch., I. Robert J., res. N. Y. City, and II. 
Jane J., who m. Nathaniel Upham, of Upham Parish, Kings Co., Can. 

78. II. SARAH ANN, b. 28 Apr., 1814, d. in infancy. 

79. III. WILLIAM M., res. Westfield, Kings Co.. N. B., b. 29 Mar., 1816, m. 3 June, 

1844. 

80. IV. JAMES, m. first in 1844, Sarah Copperthwaite, of Woodstock, Can., by 

whom 3 ch. I. Wm. F., res. Montreal, Can.; II. Elizabeth, m. C. D. 
Trueman, merchant, of St. John's, N. B., and III. Henrietta, res. 
Brooklyn, N. Y., m. Henrj' Jordan ; James (80) m. second, Charlotte 
Daniel, of St. John, N. B., by whom one dau. unm. 

81. V. JOHN, m. Mary Alice Jordan, had 4 ch. I. Arthur, who was recently 

drowned; II. Ella Le Baron; III. Margaret and IV. Burpie B. 



676 Ch. of Nathan Reed, Jacob Melick a T. Wright. 

82. VI. MARY B., res. St. John's, Newfoundland, unni. 

83. VII. MARGARET ANN, m. Edward Sentell, res. Vancouver, British Col., had 

10 ch. I. Margaret, m. Chas. M. J-'owler, of Upham, Can.; II. Mary; 
III. Ephraim; IV. Edward, dec; V. Alfred; VI. Frederick; VII. 
Sophia, m. Mi\ Cameron, of Queens Co., N. B. ; VIII. Florence. IX. 
Charlotte; X. George. 

84. VIII. SARAH ELIZABETH, m. Rev. George S. Milllgran, Supt. of Schools, at 

St. John's, Newfoundland, no ch. 

85. IX. GEORGE D., b. 1829, removed to California, 1860, has not been heard from 

in 7 years. 

86. X. CHARLOTTE, R. B., res. Houlton, Maine, m. B, O. Hatheway, no ch. 

87. XI. CAROLINE A., d. unm. 

88. XII. THOMAS P. res. Loch Lomond, Co. of St. John, Can., m. first Isabella 

Foibea of Brooklyn, N. Y., by whom 2 ch. ; ra. second Sarah Brown, of 
the Parish of Simouds, Co. of St. John, Can., by whom 3 ch. 

FOURTH GENERATION iB.) 

Nathan and Sarah (Melick) Reed (24) had 4 ch. 

89. I. JAMES LOWELL, res. Westmoreland Road, St. John, N. B., Canada, b. 9 

AuK-. 181''. m. Eliza Good, has several ch. 

90. II. ELIZA JANE, res. Bath, Maine, b. 30 Sept., 1819, m. 20 Sept., laiu, George D. 

Dunham, b. 13 June, I8l3, d. 7 Jan., 1876, had 7 ch.; I Wm. G., d. in 
infancy; II. John M., b. in 184.3, m. andhaslch.; III. Douglas A., b. 
in 1845, m. has 2 ch.; IV. James L., b. in 1848, d. 1863; V. Wm. H., b. 
18.50, d. 1856; VI. Annie E. ; VII. Emily C, d. in infancy. 

91. III. WILLIAM GODFREY M., res. 805 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn, L. I., b. 23 Mch., 

1822, m. 8 June, 18.57, Phoebe Elizabeth, dau. of Wm. Simonson, of Hemp- 
stead, L. 1., had 9 ch. 
I. William E., b. 6 April, 1852; II. Ella, b. 11 May, 1855, m. Geo. T. 

Crutlesden; III. Oscar, b. 5 Dec, 1857; IV. Annie, 8 Jan., m. 

Caspar Feld; V. Jennie W., b. 10 Sept., 1863, d. in infancy; VI. 

ISIiNNiE M., b. 10 Oct., 1864; VII. Lizzie D., b. 16 Nov., 1867, d. in 

infancy; VIII. Maggie B., b. 1 Feb., 1870; IX. Lilian D., b. 1872 d. 

1887. 

92. IV. CHARLES HENRY, b. 5 Oct., 1S24; was a mate of a sailing vessel from 

Boston ; he is supposed to have been drowned at sea, unm. 

FOURTH GENERATION (B). 

Jacob Melick (31J had 15 ch. 

9.3. I. SARAH, b. 22 Jan., 1812, m. Jerome Hartpence. 

94. II. ELIZABETH, b. 22 Oct., 1813, d. 17 Mar., lc.76, ra. 12 Oct., 1836, Thomas 

Wrijrht ; had 8 ch. 
I. Anna, b. Dec. 1838, d. 10 Jan., 1859. 
II. Emma, res. Staujiton, Va., b. 5 Mar., 1840. 

III. William M., b. 1 Dec, 1841, d. 27 Mar., 1886, m. in 1865, Cordelia Cald- 

well; has 1 ch., Anna, res. 41 Harrison Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y., b. 
1865, m. 1888, Theodore A. Newlan. 

IV. AsHER, b. 23 May, 1843, dec; m. Emma Rice. 

V. Edwin, res. Staunton, Va., b. 8 July, 1845, m. 16 Feb., 1867, Charlotte 
Veer Drury, b. Isle of Monserrat, W. I. ; had 6 ch., Tftoinas V. and 
Clara A., d. in ijifancy; Eloisa, b. 30 Sept., 1873; George S., b. 9 Feb., 
1876; Eaiptn C, b. 16 Mar., 1879; Chas. D., b. 9 Mar., 1882. 
VI. Mary, b. 2 Dec, 1847, d. in infancy. 

VII. George H., res. 500 Cambria St., Phila., Pa., b. 4 Dec, 1849. 
VIII. Lydia, b. 24 Aug-., 1857, d. in infancy. 

95. III. WILLIAM B.. b. (i April, 1815, d. 5 April, 188.5, at Albany, N. Y., m. 14 July. 

1842, Margaret Matilda Sharp, b. 8 Jan., 1821, d. 30 March, 1885, For his 
4 ch see p. 681. 
90. IV. JOANNA, b. 3 June, 1817, m. 18 Oct., 1838, William King Hulshizer, of 
Asbury, Hunterdon Co., N. J., b. 7 July, 1812; had two ch.; I. Joseph, 
b. 1830, d. 1843; II. James M., b. 23 Nov., 1851, d. 24 March, is8i, unm. 



Ch. of John S. Beeks, Daniel Melick & Jos. Eves. 677 

97. V. JOHN, b. 3 Feb., 1819, d. 30 May, 1884, m. first Elizabeth, dau. of Wm. Pinseil, 

b. 19 Feb., 1820, d. 4 Aug., 1848, by whom 3 ch. ; I Edwakd, b. 1839, d. 1851, 
II. Lydia Ann, b. 1S42, d. 1876; III. Mary Margaret, b. 1843, d. 1869, 
John (97) m. second, 30 Oct., 1849, Elizabeth, dau. Sam. Hart, of Trenton, 
N. J., b. 30 Sept., 1819, d. 4 March, 1876, by whom 4 ch. ; IV. Jacob, b. 23 
June, 1851; V. William, b. 13, April, 1854; VI. Joshua J., b. 19 Feb.. 
1857; VII. Charles G., b. 13 June, 1839. 

98. VI. GEORGE B., b. 11 Jan., 1821, d. 18 Dec, 1840, unm. 

99. VII. AMANDA, b. 19 Dec, 1822, unm. 

100. VIII. MARY CATHERINE, b. 19 Nov., 1824, d. 31 March, 1854, unm. 

101. IX. MARGARET, b. 17 Jan.. 1837, d. 9 May, 1853. 

102. X. JAMES H., b. 25 July, 1839, m. 23 Oct., 1855, Ruth Ann., dau. of Lot Breese, 

b. 27 Dec, 1830; had ch., I. Anna, b. i Jan, 1851, d. 25 Feb., 1870; II. William 
Barber, b. 19 Oct., 1859, III. Ella Breese, b. 10 Feb., 1861; IV. Matilda 
Sharp, b. 26 Aug., 18(54. 

103. XI. EMMA M., b. 33 April, 1831, d. 1 July, 1881, m. 19 Aug., 1869, Hon. Robt. S. 

Kennedy, b. 10 Oct., 1803, d. 30 Mar., 1879. He was widely Isnown 
throughout the state, and wielded much influence. Besides filling 
many minor positions of trust he was for several years one of the lay 
judges of his county, for two terms a lay judge of the Court of Errors 
and Appeals of N. J., and in 1850 was United States marshall of his 
state. Judge Kennedy was one of the founders of the Stewartsville 
Presbyterian church in Warren county, N. J., where he resided. 
No ch. 

104. XII. JANE, res. Newtown, Penna., b. 3 July, 1833, m. 25 Oct., 1855, John S. 

Beers, b. 9 Aug. 1833; d. Sept., 1888; had ch. I. Matilda Melick, b. 
6 Mar. 1857, in. Oct., 1881, John C. Harmon; II. Anna Wright, b. 15 Sep., 
1859; III. William H., b. 17 Aug., 1863, d. 7 Dec, 1863; IV. Henry 
Ogden, b. 9 Mar., 1868; V. Mary Emma, b. 18 Aug., 1871. 

105. XIII. JESSE, b. 18 Aug., 1835, d. 3. Apr., 1837. 
100. XIV. ANNIE, b. 3 Jan., 1837, d. 25 Sept., 1837. 

107. XV. LYDIA W., b. 27 April, 1838, d. 13 April, 1879. 

FOURTH GENERATION (B.) 

Daniel Melick (40) had g ch. 

108. I. PHILIP WELLER, b. 29 Feb., 1824, m. Mary Ellen, dau. of Richard Camden, 

of Mt. Bethel, Pa., by birth an Englishman, b. 18 Feb.. 1839; graduated 
from Lafayette College and Princeton Seminary; entered the Presb. 
ministry and was settled over various Pa. parishes until outbi-eak of 
Civil war, when he was commissioned chaplain of 153d Pa. Vols., 
remaining with reg't until its discharge; again was settled over various 
congregations in Pa. until 1873, when he resigned from the ministry 
and engaged in mercantile pursuits in Elizabeth City, N. C. ; had ch., I. 
Idelette, b. 25 Aug., 1863, d. 18G0; II. Camden Weller, b. 22 Aug., 
1867; III. Grace, b. 23 July, 1870; IV. Ada, b. 9 Dec. 1871. 

109. II. SARAH JANE, res. Elizabeth City, N. C, b. 30 Dec, 1825, m. 29 April, 1847, 

Joseph Eves, b. 5 Dec, 1814, d. 15 Nov., 1887; removed from Pa. to N. C. 
in 1870; hadlOch. 
I. Willis M., b. 5 April, 1848, d. 39 May, 18.50. 

II. Mary Margaret, res. Big Rapids, Mich., b. 25 July, 1849, m. 3 Jan., 

1871, William Fribley, b. 6 Dec, 1845, in Pa.; their 5 ch., Joseph J., 

b. 1873; Jesse S., b. 1876; Sarah E., b. 1879; Katie La Monte, b. 1881; and 

WiUiani H'., b. 1885. 

III. Martha Elizabeth, res. E. Citj', N. C, b. 2 Aug.. 1851. ra. Thomas B. 

Wilco.'s; has 5 ch. 
rv. AvA Atta, res. Newbegun Creek, Pasquotank Co., N. C, b. 25 Oct., 

185.3, m. John A. Mead; has 7 ch. 
V. Charles Clark, res. Newbegun Creek, N. C, b. 12 Nov., 1855, ra. Emma 

C. Davenport; has 5 ch. 
VI. Daniel H., b. 10 Nov., 1857, d. 21 Jan., 1882, m. Mary Frances; had 2 ch. 
VII. Joseph Pearce, res. Newbegun Creek, N. C, b. 27, June, I860. 
VIII. Ellie Matilda, res. N. Creek, N. C, b. 9 May, 1863, m. Robert C. Low- 
rey; has 3 ch. 



678 Cii. OF J. D. & James Melick & Nathan Stecker. 

IX. Minnie Jane, res. Virg^inia Beach, Va., b. 26 Jan., 1867, m. Taylor For- 
bes; has 1 eh. 
X. William W., res. N. Creek, N. C. b. 9 Jan., 1871. 
110. ni. JACOB 1)., rns. Muncy, Pa., b. 22 Apl., 1828. m. 16 Oct.. 1851. Elizabeth M.. 
dan. ol William White, of Columbia Co.. Pa.; Jacob D., (110) served in 
Civil war. first as 1st lleut. Columbia Co. Tigers, a company raised in 
1862 for general defence. In June, 1863. he was commissioned adju- 
tant 2Sth Reg't Infantry. Pa.. N. G.. and mustered in the service of the 
U. S. under President Lincoln's proclamation of that month; per- 
formed dutv at Harrisburg and Carlisle defending the latter town 
from Ilarley's attacli. and tooli part in dislodging the enemy from 
Hagerstown. During the last year of war was in the provost mar- 
shal's office at Williamsport, Pa., having charge of the correction of 
the enrollment of the Congressional district; had 5 ch., 
I. Del Roy, res. Muncy. Pa., b. .30 Aug., 18.53. unm. 
II. Daniel O'Rel. b. 15 Oct., 1853, d. 8 Feb.. 1869. 

III. WILLIAM McClure. res. Muncy. Pa., b. 10 Oct., 185T. 

IV. James Peahce. res. Loci? Haven. Pa., b. 4 Oct.. 1862. 
V. Jenny, b. 21 Feb., 1871, an adopted dau. and a niece. 

111. IV. MATTHFW PATTERSON, b. 30 June, 1831. d. 6 Dec, 1832. 

112. V. WILLIAM WILLET. b. 10 Jan., 1833, d. 31 Aug., l8G7, m.Jlr.s/ Margaret, dau. 

of William Mather, b. 22 Mch.. 1838. d. 24 Feb. 18G5; had ch; L William 
Calvin, b. 30 July, 1358, d. 7 Sept.. 18G1; II. Agnes, b. Feb.. 1863. d. 25 
Dec, 1884; William W. (112), m. second, S. Agnes, sister of first wife; her 
res. Orangeville. Columbia Co., Pa. 

113. JOHN P., b. 18 Aug., 183... d. 5 May 1836. 

114. VII. MARY ELIZABETH, b. '25 March. 1837. ra. 10 Sept., 1856, Nathan W. 

Steelier, b. 15 Sept., 1832, res. 440 Twentieth street, San Francisco Cal.; 
had ch.; I. Eugene Addison, b. .31 March, 18.'>8; II. Wilbur Melick. b. 
29 April, 1801. d. 8 Aug., 1863; III. Frank Dana. b. 20 Aug., 1863. d. 26 
Nov.. 1803; IV. Henry McClure, b. 26 Mch., 186.5. m. Dec, 1885. Min- 
nie Updegraff; res., Wallace, New Mexico; V. Mary Margaret, b. 
23 Dec, 1867. 

115. VIII. DANIEL RAMSEY, b. 21 Nov., 1839, d. 17 May, 1866, from consumption 

contracted in army; m. 4 May., 1865. Sarah Matilda, dau. of John 
White, b. 21 Oct.. 1841; he graduated from Lafayette medical college, 
practiced as a pliysician, and served during rebellion as lieut., Co. G. 
132d Regt. Penna. Vols; he commanded his company in a brilliant 
charge at Antletam. and at the repulse at Fredericksburg after his 
regt. had been driven back he returned to the field and carried off his 
wounded brother. James P., (116) amid a storm of shot and shell; no 
ch. 
IIG. IX. JAMES PEARCE. b. 20 June, 1843. d. 28 Dec, 1SG2: served during Civil 
War as corporal Co. G. 132nd regt.. Pa.. Vols.; wounded at Autietam, 
17 Sep., 1862, again in the charge at Fredericksburg. 13 Dec, 1862, caus- 
ing his death at Mt. Pleasant Hospital, 15 days later. A boy in years, 
a man in heart and courage. 

FOURTH GENERATION (B.) 

James Melick (41) had 7 ch. 

HENRY J., res. Philipsburg, N. J., b. 13 March, 1808, m. 17 April, 1834. 
RACHEL, b. 10 Dec, 1810, d. in Dec, 1840, m. 10 May, 1837, Philip Shlpman; 
had 1 ch., d. in infancy. 
, WILLIAM S., b. 7 March, 1812, d. 29 Oct., 1882. unm. 
REBECCA, res. Philipsburg. N. J., b.8 June. 1814, unm. 

JAMES S.. res. Williamsport, Pa., b. 29 March, 1816, m. 25 Nov., 1851. Mary 
Martha, dau. of Ralph Hunt, b. 21 July. 1827; had 3 ch.. 
I. Mary Elizabeth, res. Philipsburg, N. J., b. 21 Sep., 1854, m. James H. 
Hess, b. 23 June. 1854; their 3 ch.. Clarence B., b. 2 Nov., 1877; Henry 
Lewis, b. 16 Dec, 1870; Annie Hunter, b. 13 Dec. 1884. 
II. James Bergen, 530 East 3rd St., AVilliamsport, Pa., b. 14 Aug.. 1857, m. 
Annie, dau. of James M. Purcell, b. 21 Oct., 185S; their 2 ch., Ma7-y 
P.- Hnrtha //., b. 2 Nov., 18->8. 



111. 

lis. 


X. 

II. 


119. 


Ill, 


120. 


rv. 


121. 


V. 



( 

Children of Andrew and Stephen Melick. 679 

III. Ida, b. 13 Aug., 1863. 

122. VI. ELIZABETH, b. Aug., 1818, d. in infancj-. 

123. Vll. SARAH JANE, b. Oct., 22, m. 1826 Nov., 1852, William AUshouse, b. 28 

Dec. 1830, was a tanner and currier at Belvidere, N. J., and was sur- 
rogate of tiie CO. from 1859 to 1864; in 1800 removed to present res. Pon- 
tiac, Mich. ; had ch., I. Flobence, b. u Oct., 18.53, unm. ; II. Catha- 
rine M., b. 2 July, 185.5, unm.; HI. John C, b. 15 Nov., 1857, m. 15 June, 
1881, Sarah Melissa, dau. of Ale.v. G. Collins, b. 29 Oct., I860; their ch., 
£'<7ie?, b. 13 May, 1883, and Chester, b. 8 Oct., 1884. res. Pontiac, Mich.; 

IV. Elizabeth, b. 18 May, is.59, unm.; V. Eda. b. 1 Dec, 1863, m. Joseph 
A. Linabury, b. 15 March, 1838, hotel keeper at Pontiac, Mich. 

FOURTH GENERATION (B). 

Andrew Melick (54) had 7 ch. 

124. I. CATHARINE, b. 10 Feb., 1817, m. Isaac White, had 9 ch.; Newton White, of 

Bloomsburg, Col. Co., Pa., is a son. 

125. II. ELIZA, b. 14 Nov., 1819, m. 29 Jan., 1840, Samuel B. Henry, b. 1 May, 1817; 

she dec; his res. Orangeville, Pa.; had ch., I. James, b. 14 Nov,, 1840, d. 
in infancy; II. Sarah Louisa, b. 10 Sep., 1841; III. Mary Catherine, 
b. 27 Feb!, 184.3, d. 23 Apl., 1863; IV. Francis Stewart, b. 22 Jan., 1844; 

V. Joseph Benson, b. 29 Feb., 1846, d. 8 Mch., 18G6; VI. Eudora Ann, b. 20 
Jan., 1847; VII. Jairus Day, b. 13 Feb., 1849; VIII. Andrew Boyd, b. 
19, Nov., 1850; IX. NoRA Matilda, b. 22 Sep., 1852, d. in infancy, X. 
Lizzie, b. 4 Sep., 18.54, d. in infancy, XL Evageen, b. 3 Sep., 1855; XII 
Orval a., b. 2 Sep., 1857; XIII. John Harvey, b. 5 Oct., 1859. 

126. ni! JACOB, b. 8 Apl., 1823, m. Minerva Melvina Kline, res. Pittston, Pa., had 

ch.; I. Hester Anne, b. 20 June, 1847, m. Daniel Long, res. Pittston, 
Pa., II. Francis, b. 25 June, 1851, dec. ; IIT. Sarah Ambli a, b. in Aug., 
1856, m. Jasper Creveling, res. Pittston, Pa. ; IV. Amos W., b. 29 Sep.. 
1860, res. Bloomsburg, Pa. 

127. IV. JOHN A., res. Shiloh, Richland, Co., Ohio, b. 25 Aug., 1828, m. 25 Sept., 

1851, Sarah Jane, dau. of Samuel White, of Columbia, Co., Pa., b. 4 July. 
18.34. For his 8 ch. see p 081. 
138. V. SARAH ANN, b. 10 May, 1831, m. Peter White, res. Mendon, St. Jos. Co., 
Mich. 

129. VI. HESTER ANN, b. 18 May, 1835, m. Jas W. Shipman, res. Shiloh, Ohio; had 

ch.; I. ANDREW J., b. 26 Sept., 18,57; II. Sarah M., b. 24 Jan., 18.59; III. 
John H., b. 22 Aug., 1804, m. 23 Dec, 1883, Mamie, dau. of Clark Cleve- 
land. 

130. VII. ANDREW R. b. 21 May, 1841,^d. in infancy. 

FOURTH GENERATION (B). 

Stephen Melick (56) had 8 ch. 

131. I. ELIZABETH, b. 20 March, 1831, d. 30 Sept., 1858, unm. 

132. II. RACHEL ANN, res. Town Hill, Luzerne Co., Pa., b. 9 Aug.. 1833, m. 1 June, 

1856, Robert W. Chapin, b. 11 Oct., 1834, had 3 ch., I. Stephen W., b. 27 
Jan., 1858; II. Charles E., b. 23 April, 1801, d. 18 March, 1864; III. 
Minnie R., b., 18 Dec, 1868, d. 14 Jan., 1872. 

133. III. ANDREW, b. 25 Dec, 1835, d. 29 Dec, 1880, m. 1 Jan., 18G3, Abiah, dau. of 

Peter Franklin; had Ich., Fredonia, b. 27 Jan., IS66. 

134. IV. PETER, res. Watertown, Luzerne Co., Pa., b. 27 May, 1838, m. 28 June, 1868. 

Margaret J., dau. of Samuel Wilcox, b. 10 Aug., 1848; had 6ch., I. Ruth 
C, b. 25 Jan., 1809;II. Sadie, b. 28 March, l87o; III. Clara J., b. 5 Jan., 
1871; IV. Leroy S., b. 17 March, 1873; V. Otto, b. 5 July, 1877; VI. Han- 
nah L., b. .30 Dec, 1881. 

135. V. STEPHEN, b. 13 Nov., 1840. d. 7 April, 1870, m. 19 Sept., 1869, Elizabeth, dau. 

of Daniel Sutlitf, widow, m. Charles Hughes, res. Catawissa, Colum- 
bia Co.. Pa.; had 1 ch., Lena, b. 22 July. I87p. 

136. VI. CATHARiNK, res. Watei-town. Luzerne Co., Pa., b. 6 March, 1843, ni. 20 

Aug.. 1867. Benjamin A. Bidlack, b. 1 Aug., 1842; had 3 ch., I. SarahA., 
b. 18 Oct., 1872; II. Amy B.. b S April, 1875; III. Stephen B., twin. b. 8 
April, 1875. 



680 Ch. of Godfrey, James G. and Wm. H. Melick. 

137. VIT. FANNY, b. 24 June, 1846, m.jfrsf, 19 Sept., 18<39, John Watson, b. 14 Jan., 

1841, d. 3 May, 1872, by whom 1 ch., I. Wii.,t,iAM Wood; m., second, 7 Feb., 
1877, Georg-e D. Brandon, b. In W25, by whom .3 ch., II. George A., III. 
Saida E., IV. Emma L. 

138. Vni. SXnderson W., b. 21 Jan., 184C, d. 15 May, 1875. unra. 

FOURTH GENERATION (B.) 

Godfrey Melick (58) had 4 ch. by ist wife Susan Kline. 

139. I. HENRY, b. 1 May, 1836, m. Margaret, b. in Dec, 1839, and had 1 ch., Laura, b. 

28 Feb., 1883. 

140. II. CLINTON, b. 16 Feb., 1839, m. 31 Dec., 186.3, and had 5 ch., I. Emma, b. 23 Aug., 

1804; II. Minnie A., b. 11 March, 1873; III. Cora R., b. 25 Aug., 1877; IV. 
Della, b. 21 March, 1881; V. Henry C, b. 30 Jan., 1885. 

141. III. MARY CATHARINE, b. 17 Oct., 1840, d. in 1863, m. in 1862. Henry Hippen- 

stiel, res. Orangeville, Col. Co., Pa. ; had l ch., Henry, b. in Feb., 1885. 

142. IV, REBECCA ANN, b. 14 Aug., 1845, m. Abraham Kline, and has 4 ch. 

Godfrey (58) had 4 ch. by 2d wife, Caroline Jacoby. 

143. V. JOHN, res. Canby, Col. Co., Pa., b. 7 June. 1851, m. Clara Everitt, and had 6 

ch., I. Verda Letitia, b. 29 July, 1878; II. Franklin T.. b. 19 Feb., 
1880; III. Elmira Caroline, b. 29 April, 1881; IV. Jessie Loella, b. 5 
Dec., 1882; V. Stella Pearl, b. lo June, 1885; VI. Oscar Ray, b. 9 
July, 1887. 

144. VI. LYDIA ELLEN, b. 17 Jan., 1856, unm. 

145. VII. SUSAN MARIA, b. 1 Aug., 1857, m. Matthias Whitnight. 

146. VIII. HARRIET LUCINDA. 

FOURTH GENERATION (B). 

James Godfrey Melick (64) had 7 ch. 

147. I. GEORGE GODFREY, res. 109 State St., Boston, Mass., b. 19 Oct., 1836. m. 13 

Dec, 1867, Mary Ann Matilda, dau. of James D. Perkins, of St. John, 
N. B., b. 27 March. 1846; had 6 ch., I. Minnie, b. 7 April, 1868, d. 11 April, 
1870; II. George H., b. 11 Oct., 1869; III. Unita, b. 7 May, 1873, d. in 
infancy; IV. Charles D., b. 5 Jan., 1878, d. 4 March, 1S8G; V. Myrtle 
L. Kent, b. 5 March, 1879; VI. Martin Lansdowne, b. 31 July, 1881. 

148. II. MARY ELIZA, b. 27 Aug., 1838, d. 5 Oct.. 1858. 

149. IIL JAMES WILLIAM, res. St. John, N. B., b, 19 March, 1840, d. 3 May, 1889, m. 

in June, 187.3, Kate McCaffrey, of Fredericton, N. B., had ch., I. Fred- 
erick; II. Frank; III. Lizzie; IV. Herbert. 

150. IV. FREDERICK COLBROOK, res. St. John, N. B.. b. 17 July, 1843, unm. 

151. V. DEBORAH JULIETTE, b. 26 June, 184.5, m. 27 Nov., 1873, James E. Fair- 

weather, res. Hampton. N. B.. no ch. 
152 VI. CATHERINE ALICE, b. 15 Nov., 1847, m. 11 Oct., 1871. Charles D. McAvity. 
res. Hampton, N. B. ; had 5 ch., I. William Douglas, b. 17 Sept., 1872; II. 
George Thomas, b. 9 Feb., 1875; III. Caroline Maud, b. 9 July, 1878, 
IV. James Herbert, b. 14 Feb., 1883; V. Kate Isabel, b. 9 July, 1885. 

153. VII. ANDREW WELLINGTON, res. St. John. N. B.. b. 28 July. 1850, m. 14 Feb., 

1883. Isabel Hayward, has 2 ch., I. Helen L., b. 26 Nov., 1883; II. Ethei. 
W., b. C April, 1885. 

FIFTH GENERATION. 

William Hughes Melick (6g) had 5 ch. 

154. I. CHARLOTTE LOUISA, b. 6 April, 1839, m. 23 Jan., 1861, Peter M. Van 

Keuren, of N. Y. city; had 4 ch., I. Wm. M., b. 17 Jan., 18C4, d. 21 Feb.. 
1806; II. Jessie, b. 19 Dec, 1806, d. 25 Sept., 1867; III. Georgine M., b. 
14 Sept., 1868; IV. Helen, b. 29 Jan., 1871, res. 357 Garden street, Hobo- 
ken, N. J. 

155. II. JOHN HENRY, b. S July, 1841, d. 14 July, 1841. 

156. ni. SARAH JANE, b. 2 Oct., 1842, m. 21 Jan., 1863, James A. Purdy, of N. Y. 

city; had 2 ch., I. Mary M., b. 3 Mar., 1804, d. 13 Sept., 1886, m. 22 May, 

1884, Tbos. H. Sheffield, of Stoningtwn, Conn., had 1 ch., Warren 
Thomas, b. 15 Mar., 1885; res. Hoboken; II. William M., b. 24 Oct.. 1867. 



Ch. of John H., William B., and John Melick. 681 

157. IV. ANNA GEOKGINA, b. 11 Feb., 1845, m. 12 Oct., 1770, J. GoodheartDe Voe; 

had 3ch., I. Charlotte L., b. 11 Feb., 1876; II. Alice E., b. 34 Nov., 1881> 
III. Thurman G., b. 5 Oct., 1886. Res. Hoboken. 

158. V. John, b. i April, 1847, d. 8 Dec., 1654. 

FIFTH GENERATION (B). 

John Hughes Melick (70) had 7 ch. 

159. I. RACHEL POSTEN, b. 20 Feb., 1842, d. 3 July. 1842. 

160. II. EDWARD POSTEN, b. 31 May, 1843, killed at Atitietera 17 Sept., 1862, he 

joined Co. G., Capt. Abbott, 132 Regt., Pa. Vols. Just seven weeks from 
the day he left home he fell on the field of battle; during his short 
military career his conduct and bearing' were so brave and admirable 
as to attract particular attention, and had he lived he doubtless would 
have attained promotion and distinction. 

161. III. SARAH, b. 6 June, 1845, unmarried; res. Stroudsburg, Penna. 

162. IV. ADDISON BROWN, b. 20 May, 1847, m. IG Mar., 1876 to Emma Edinger; res. 

Stroudsburg, Penna., had ch., I. Wm. E., b. 22 May, 1879. 

163. V. HESTER A., b. 12 April, 1849, d. 24 Nov., 1888, m. 15 Nov., 1887, Alfred B. 

Grofl, of Washington, N. J. 

164. VI. MARY, b. 28 April, 1851, d. 1 Jan., 1870. 

165. VII. HELEN, b. 26 Mar., 185.3, m. 2 Sept., 1879, Charles Creveling;b. 4 April, 

1841; res. Oxford Furnace, N. J.; had 3 ch., I. Jane, b. 1 July, 1880; 11. 
Jacob Van Horn and Elizabeth C, twins, b. 25 Aug., 1882. 

FIFTH GENERATION (B). 

William Barber Melick (95) had 4 ch. 

166. I. EMMA, b. 8 July, 1843, m. 15 Jan., 1861, Chas. B. Heydon ; res. 186 Jay St., 

Albany, N. Y., had 4 ch., I. Elizabeth Sharp, b. 25 Nov., 1861, m. 14 
Sep., 1881, George W. Coriell, res. New Market, N. J.; II. Agnes 
Amelia, b. 28 Feb., 1867; III. Emma Melick, b. 7 Oct., 1875; IV. Alice 
Read, b. 7 Nov., 1878. 

167. II. MARTHA, b. 4 Oct., 1845. 

168. III. JAMES REDFORD, b. 12 Oct., 1849, m. 23 Dec, 1869, Margaret E., dau. of 

Ben. Kirtland; had 10 ch, I. Charlotte Thurber, b. 24 Sep., 1870; II. 
Chas. Benj., b. 18 Oct., 1872; III. William Barber, b. 2 Oct., 1874; IV. 
Daniel Read, b. 3 Jan., 1876; V. James Redford, Jr., b. 25 Jan., 1879; 
VI. and VII. Frederick and Frank, b. 31 Jan., 1881, d. 2 July. 1881; 
VIII. Arthur Kirtland, b. 9 Jan.. 1884, d. 3 Oct.. 1884; IX. Philip 
Wackerhagen, b. 19 Aug., 1885; X. Henry Read. b. 20 Aug., 1888. 

169. IV. ELIZABETH SHARP, b. 18 July, 1852, m. 5 Oct., 1875, Daniel P. Read, res. 

268 W. 13th St., N. Y. City; had 2 ch., I. Archie, b. 17 June, 1878, d. in 
infancy; II. Henry M., b. 26 Dec, 1879. 

FIFTH GENERATION (B). 

John Melick (127) had 8 ch. 

170. I. SAMUEL HUBERT, b. 22 May, 1853, m. 1 Jan., 1878, Lucy, dau. of David 

Myers. 

171. II. ANDREW NEWTON, b. 7 May, 1856, m. 22 Feb., 1886, Florence, dau. of John 

Licy. 

172. III. WILLIAM CLARK, b. 4 Aug., 18.58, m. 27 Dec. 1877, Matilda, dau. of Wil- 

liam McKinney, b. 4 Aug., 1857. 

173. IV. JOHN CLEMUEL, b. 7 June, 1860, m. 22 Jan., 1885. Dora, dau. of John 

Fransky. 

174. V. CHARLES ELLSWORTH, b. 6 July, 1863. 

175. VI. MINNIE JANE, b. 18 Aug., 1868, m. 23 June. 1887. Frank Bricker. 

176. VII. IDA MAY, b. 23 April, 1872. 

177. VIII. EDWARD HAYES, b. 23 March, 1877, 



CS2 JoHAN Peter Moelich and his son Tunis Melick. 



JOHAN PETER MOELICH (C.) 

His son Tunis Melick of Hunterdon Co., N. J., and descendants. 
1. JOHAN FKTEK MOELICH was the son of Johan Wilbelm (XXVI) and Anna 
Katherine of Bendorf on the Rhine, Germany, where he was b. in 1708, 
and bap. in the Evangelical Head-Church, by the Kevd. Johannes 
Iteusch, the certificate reading:— "The 9th Sunday after Trinity, 1708, 
to Master Hans Wilhelm Molich of this place a young- son has been 
baptized and named by the Christian name, Johann Peter. The god- 
fathers were Mr. Peter Holfbauer, citizen at Winniugen, and Johann 
Peter Molich, bachelor, of this place. The godmother was Master 
Hermann's, of Hbchstenbach, conjugal housewife, the child's mother's 
own sister. God grant to the baptized all prosperity on earth, and 
after this life in eternity. Amen." Godfather Johan Peter Molich. 
bachelor, was Hans Peter (VIII), son of Jonas (V); he must have mar- 
ried soon after this time as his first child Jonas (XV) was born in 17iO. 
When but twenty years old Johan Peter (I) emigrated to America 
landing at Philadelphia, '2i Aug., 1738, from the ship, " Mortouhouse, " 
John Coultas, master. The vessel sailed from Rotterdam, touching at 
Deal, and leaving the last port, June 15. The records of Palatine 
arrivals preserved at Harrisburg do not show that he brought with 
him either wife or child. He probably married soon after arrival as 
his son Tunis was born in 1730. As no traces of him have been found 
In New Jersey he probably remained in Pennsylvania, perhaps at 
Germantown, from whence many of the New Germantown, N. J., 
Germans migrated. He was not living in 175.5, as the record of the 
marriage of his child Maria Catharina (3), in that yeai-, describes her as 
"the daughter of the late John Peter Melick." All his decs, spell 
their name Melick, 

SECOND GENERATION (C.) 

Johan Peter Moelich or Melick had at least 3 ch. 

•Z I. TUNIS, ANTON, or ANTHONY, b. 6 Mar., 1730, d. 27 Nov., 1795; m. Eleanor, 
dau. of Abraham Van Horn, of White House, Hunterdon Co., N. J., b. 
21 Mar., 173J, d. 3. Jan., 1819, from burns caused by her clothing igniting 
from the fireplace; both are buried in Zion churchyard. New German- 
town, N. J. He first settled at White House, where he built a grist 
mill on South Rockaway Creek, on land now owned by Wyckotf Van 
Horn, fronting on the read leading from the village to the railway 
station. Subsequently he removed to New Germantown. in the same 
county, where he purchased 200 acres of land from Ralph Smith, upon 
which he built a new mill, removing the gear from the old one. This 
property became his homestead, and, though not since then continu- 
ouslj' possessed by his posterity, is now owned and occupied by a 
descendant, Peter W. Melick (21). Tunis was actively interested in the 
affairs of his vicinity; served as county freeholder from 1776 to 1794, 
inclusive, for a number of years was a leading member of Zion Luth- 
eran Church, and was instrumental in founding the first Methodist 
congregation of his county. (See p. 8S) For his 8 ch. see p. t'>H3. 

a. II. MARIA CATHARINE, b. 13 July, 1732, d. 22 Jan., 1807; m. 3 Apl., 1755, John 
Henry, son of John Valentine Miiller, b. Ji May, 1728, in " Dudcr MosJi- 
olem inAmpt Lnntzberrj in liei- riatz Zweibriicken,'' Germany, d. 9 Feb., 
1819. He lauded in Philadelphia, 12 Aug., Y!'A and removed to New 
Jersey 3 Apl., 1753. He is said to have been a Redemptioner; if this be 
true he probably paid for his passage and gained his liberty before 
reaching New Jersey. He scttle<l near New Germantown in Huntex- 
don county, where he became a valued citizen, being for thirty-one 
years the elerk of Tewskbury township. He was a devout Christian 
and prominent in the Zion Lutheran congregation. His family Bible, 
which has been preserved, freely testifies as to his deeply religious 
nature. On entering in German the record of his marriage, he added : 
"May the good God rule our hearts and minds through His Holy 



Ch. of J. H. Miller, Tunis ^[elick & Isaac Farley. 683 

Spirit in Christ Jesus. Araen." The bii-th of his first child isinscribed 
as follows : " lu 1758 on the 11th day of July has the dear God rejoiced 
us with a daughter, and has permitted her to come happily into the 
world and to receive Holy Baptism ou the 6th day of Aug-ust and has 
given berthe Christian name of Elizabeth." An equally pious an- 
nouncement is made of the advent of each child. When the list was 
complete he wrote: " May the dear God guide and rule these my dear 
children with His Holy and good Spii it and grant that they may be 
religious and God fearing. May they love God and walk in his ways. 
May they love right and justice and avoid sin. Amen." This old fam- 
ily register thus recounts the death of his wife: "1807. To day the 
2-2d Jan. at 12 o'clock noon, has my dear wife Maria Cathrina fallen 
peacefully asleep in the Lord and will be buried on the 25th day. 
After we have lived flfty-one years nine months and three weeks 
together in the Holy estate of Matrimony. And she is the first one 
who has died in my house. May the dear God prepare us who are left 
behind to follow piously after, for the sake of His dear Son Jesus 
Christ. Amen." John Henry Miiller and Maria Catharine Melick had 
3ch., 
7. Elizabeth, b. 11 July, 1758, d. G Jan.. 1S45, m. V2 May, 1772, Christian, 
the son of Godfrey Kline, who emigrated from Bendorf, Germany: 
this Godfrey was born in Bendorf 30 Oct., 1726, and was the son of 
Christian Kline, a "military horseman" from Homburg (see p. 
91); Elizabeth and Christian had '12 ch., EUzaDeth, b. 10 Sep., 
1779, d. 22 Sep., 1781; Mary Catharine, b. 5 Jan., 1781, m. Simeon 
Wyckoff, and removed to Illinois; Henry M., b. 10 Jan., 1783, 
m. Sarah Ramsey; David M., b. 1 Jan. 178.5, d. 6 Dec, 1861, 
m. Elizabeth Hagei-, Avho d. 19 Mch., 1835; Ida, b. 8 Dec, 1786, 
m. Harmon Dilts; Elizabeth, b. 4 Dec, 1788, d. 9 Jan., 1861, m. 
John Ramsey; Fhehe, 18 Oct., 1790; Eifther, b. in 1792, d. in infancy; 
Hatiiiah, b. 1 Nov., 1794, m. a Henry; Sarah S., b. 22 June. 1797; 
Jacob M., b. 23 July, 1799, m. first, Phebe Kuhl, second, a Fisher; 
LagettaU. b. in 1801, d. in 1815. 
II. Maria Cathrina, b. 12 Feb., 17G3, m. Baitis Stiger. 

III. Henry, b. 7 Nov., 1766, m.jlrst a Baird, secori.a, Catherine Sharp, their 

3 ch.. Jacob B., Ann and John P. 

IV. David, b. 28 Apl., 1769, m. Elizabeth Welch, their 9 ch., .lacoh W., William 

W., David W., Henry, Eliza, Dorothy, Mary, Catherine, and Lydia 
Ann.. (H. W, Miller, pres. Morris Co. Savings Bank at Morristown 
is a son of Jacob W., and owns John Henry Miller's (the immi- 
grant) family Bible. 
v. Jacob, b. S June, 1771, m. Elizabeth Sharp. 
•4. III. JOHN was a tanner and currier in the city of New York, where he died in 
1767, his will being dated 26 Sep., and proved 24 Dec of that year. His 
executors were his brother Tunis and his brother-in-law, Henry 
Miller, of N. J., and Peter Grimm, of N. Y. city. The will named a 
wife Christiana and 6 ch., I. John, II. Mary, III. Elizabeth, IV. 
Catherine. V. Margaret. VI. Sarah. 

THIRD GENERATION (C.) 

Tunis Melick (21 had 8 ch. 

5. I. PETER, b. 4 Dec, 17.58, succeeded his father on the homestead where he d. 18 

Nov.. 1818; m. 27 Feb., 178.% Susanna, dau. of Nicholas Egbert, of Read- 
ington, tp., b. .3 Mch., 1763, d. 2 May, 1837. For his 10 ch. see p. 686. 

6. II. ANNA, d. about 1831, m. 7 Dec, 1779, Isaac Farley, of Cokesburg, Hunterdon 

Co., who d. about 1814; had 11 ch., viz: (order of names partly conjec- 
tural.) 
I. Anthony (Tunis) b. 7 Sep.. 1780, d. 8 Apl., 1846; m. Elizabeth, dau. of 
Richard Suti on, of Tewltsbury tp. ; their in ch. ; Richard ,9., b. in 1802, 
d. in 1881, m. Margaret, dau. of Herbert Apgar, and had 10 ch.; 
Isaac, d. unm.; Eliza, m. Samuel Crooks and had 2 ch.; Mt^ri'i/, m. 
^/rs/, a Johnson, .s'eco//rf, John Ryan;.Vrt?7/ Ann, had 3 husbands; 
Althea, who m. John Force, of Rochester, N. Y. ; Ellen, res. Phila. , 
m. James Buist, and has 4 eh.; Frames, ra. William Benjamin; 



684 Ch. of Tunis Melick, Isaac & Mindart Farley. 

Anthoiin, res. Scotch Plains, N. J., m. ^rs< Harriet Lyons, second, 
Mary Roll; MarfjarH, res. Plainflcld, N. J., ra./«v.s« John Meeker, 
second, Charles Coltier. 
II. MiNAUD, b. in 1782, d. in 184.% m. Mary Frazor, b. in 1783, d. in 1849, 
removed from N. J. in 18.28, settlinjf in N. Y. State.'and 4 years later 
at South Lyons, Washtenaw Co., Michigan, where he died; 
their 9 ch.; Imac, b. in 1803, d. in infancy; ixiKid, b. in 1805. d. In 
1888, jn. Rosina Blackmar, and had 4 ch. ; WiUiaiii, of Albion, 
Mich., b. in I8u7, d. in 1872, m. Sally Ann Ostrom, and had 4ch. ; 
Sarah F.,\i. in 1809, d. in 1852, m. Lemuel Droelle, and had 2 dau.; 
Isabel, res. Salem, Mich.,b. in 1812, m. Eli Smith, has 2 ch.; 
Eleanor, b. iu 1814. d, in 1882, unm.; Archibald, b. in 1816, dec; 
Anthony M., b. 19 May, 1817, d. in 1882, in. Rosina Packard, and had 3 
sous; Manning F., b. in 1820. 

III. William, dec, m.flrst a Pa. Quakeress, by whom one son, William, a 

Phila. physician; m. second, Anne Garretsonot New Germantown, 
N. J., by whom several ch. 

IV. Barbara, m. Minard Pickel of White House, N. J., dec; they removed 

to Ohio, thence to Indiana; left ch. 

V. Margaret W.. b. 27 Dec, 1792, d. 17 Nov., 1860, m. Joseph Stevens, b. in 
1792, d. in 1864 ; their 10 ch., Henry J., b. in 1813, d. in 1885, ni. Margaret 
R.. dau. of Joseph Hoffman, of Lebanon, N. J., and had 3 ch. ; Den- 
nis If'., m. first, Sarah, dau. of John Ramsey, second, Elizabeth, 
widow of John llodenbaugh, lliird, Amanda, dau. of George 
Neighbour, noch. ; Tsdac F., res. Illinois, m. Naomi, dau. of John 
W. Gaston, of Pluckamin, N. J., and had 5 ch. ; Elizabeth, h. in 1819, 
d. in 1878, m. Zachariah Z. Smith, of Peapack, N. J., and had 4 ch.; 
Mary, m. Amos Oliver, of New Vernon, N. J., and had 8 ch. ; George 
J., b. in 1822, d. in 1872, m. first, Phebe Ann Oliver, of New Vernon, 
by whom 3 ch., m. second, Elizabeth, widow of George Neighbour, 
by whom 2 ch.; Catherine, m. Van Arsdale Cortleyou, of Bedmins- 
ter, N. J., and had 7 ch.; Margaret, res, Somerville, m. Ell Crater, of 
Peapack, noch.; Joseph C, m. twice and has one ch. ; Sarali, res. 
Raritan, N. J. 
VI. Catherine, d. in 1832, m. Jacob Hoffman, of Lebanon, N. J., dec. ; their 
2 ch., Angeline, b. in 18-35, d. in 1847, m. William S. Burrell, noch.; 
Hannah, res. Somerville, m. Stephen Jerolanien, and has 4 ch. 
VII. Eleanor, ra. Aai'on Smock, and removed with her husband to Ohio. 
VIII. Eliza, b. about 1800, dec, m. Robert Blair, dec, their 3 ch., William, 
who is m. and lives in Ohio: Lydin; Ellen,, res, Chicago, 111., m. 
Martin Hoagland, and has 3 ch. 
IX. Mary Ann, b. in 1802, d. 1887, m. first, Jacob Apgar, b. in 1802, d. in 1850, 
by whom 4 ch.; m. second, Charles Wolverton, of Tewkesbury, tp.. 
Hunt. Co., N. J.; her ch. by Apgar, Ann Elizabeth, m. John W. 
Melick, of New Germantown, and had 7 ch.: Catherine C, b. in 
1824, d. in 1868, m. Peter W. Melick. and had 10 ch.; Maria C, b. in 
1827, d. iu 1850, ra. Stephen B. Ransom, of Jersey City, and had 3 ch. ; 
Lydia, res. Streator, 111., b. 1 Nov., 1830, m. ./??-s<, Henry T. Hage- 
nian, of Bedminster, by whom one son; m. second, Edward Kline, 
by whom ch. 

X. Charles, d. in youth. 
XI. Anna, d. in youth. 
7. III. MARY CATHERINE (TREENIE), b. 15 Feb., 1763, d. 13 Mar., 1832, m. Mindart 
Farley, of Cokesburg, N. J., had 3 ch., 
I. Barbara, b. 22 Dec, 1783, d. 17 Dec, 18.)1, m. Archibald Kennedy, b. in 
1787, d. in 1857, their 2 ch., Mary,X>. in 1806, d. in 1833, m. Daniel K. 
Reading, of Flemington, N. J., had one son, dec; Catherine, b. in 
181.3, d. in 1S:«, m. Rev'd. George F. Brown, of N. J. M. E. Confer- 
ence, one son, dec. 

II. Anthony M., b in 1769, d. in 18.)1, m. first, Keturah, dau. of Col. Wil- 
liam McCullough, of Asbury, N. J., by whom 5 ch., 
William .»/., d. in infancy; Catherine, d. in infancy; Minard, res. N. 
Y. city, unm.; William, res. New Germantown, unm.; Elizabeth, 
res. Pelhamville, N. J., m. George H. McGalliard, and has3ch., 



Ch. of T. Melick, D. Wyckoff & Cohnelils Vliet. 685 

Anthony M. Farley, m. second, Sarah E., dau. of Judge Miller, of 
Ithaca, N. Y., d. in 1849, by whom 4 ch., Snrah H., who m. Lyman 
Crego, and has 3 ch. ; Margaret E., res. Truraausburg-, N. Y., m. 
Faith Williams, no ch. ; two sons who d. in infancy. 
III. Francis Asbdry, b. 17 Apl., 1807, d. 16 Sep., 1380, m. 19 Jan., 1873, (at the 
age of 6.i), Calvina, (ag-ed 14) dau. of Christopher B. Hag-eman, of 
Pottersville, N. J., no ch. 
8. IV. ELIZABETH, m. .30 Apl., 1789, Martin Mehle, of Germantown, Pa., and had 
3, perhaps more, ch,, viz. : — 
I. Eleanor, d. 5 May, 1816, m. 5 May, 1812, Aaron Lambert, b. in 1789, d- 
in 1869; their 3 ch., Mary Ann, res. New Hope, Pa., b. in 1813, unm. 
Caroline, res. N. H., unm.; and Elizabeth, who d. in infancy. 
II. Anthony M. 
III. Jacob, m. a Miss McAulay and had 4 ch., Edxoara, Theodore, Elizabeth, 
and Eleanor. 
9. V. MARGARET, b. 27 Nov., 1769. d. 19 Apl., 1857, ra. 22 Nov., 1792, Dennis 
Wyckoff, of White House, N. J., b. 17 Apl., 1760, d. 6 Dec. 1830; he was a 
justice of the peace and an influential citizen ; had 7 ch. 
I. Simon D., Ulster Co., N. Y., twice married, had 4 ch. by first and 2 by 
second wife. 
II. Tunis, b. 25 Jan., 1797, d. 4 Maj-, 1871, xa.jlrst, Ann Vosseller, b. in 1797, 
d. in 1S47; m. second, Mrs. Ruth Reas, d. 4 July, 1876; he left Hunter- 
don Co., N. J., in 1836, moving- his family in wagons to Wooster, 
Wayne Co., Ohio., where he bought a farm upon which he lived 
until his death, had ch., all by first wife. Margaret M., res.. North 
English, Iowa, b. 17 May, 1819, m. Thomas Buciiley, and has 6 ch., 
John v., res. Richfield, O., Ann Eliza, b. in 1824, d. in 1884, m. Ezra 
Munson, leftSch.; Dennis, b. in 1826, d. in 1876, unm.; LuKe V., res.. 
West Richfield, O., b. 23 Mch., 1829; Sarah E., res. Wooster, O., b. 29 
May, 1831, m. Joseph Kimber, their eldest sou, D. W. Kimbei-, lives 
at Excelsior Springs, Mo. ; Mary, b. in 1834, d. in infancy. 

III. George D., b. in l8i)0, d. in 1829, m. Maria Waldron, and had 4 ch., but 

two living. 

IV. Dennis, m. Martha Lowe, and had -5 ch. 

V. Eleanor, m. flrst, Henry Vroom, by whom one dau., Henrietta, b. In 

1836, d. in 187-5, who m. Lewis Van Doren, of Peapack, N. J., and 

, had 3 ch. (see p. 2.50); Eleanor Wyckoff (V) m. second, John Kline, 

of Readington, N. J., b. in 1784, d. in 1880. 

VI. Peter M., b. in isu9, d. in 1834, m. in 1832, Alice Polhemus, left one son, 

Edgar P., who lives in Brooklyn, unm. 
VII. Eliza, m. Abraham Van Pelt, of Brauchburg, N. J.; their 3 ch., Ralph, 
res. Bound Brook, N. J., m. Kate Powelsou, and has2ch.; Mntlheio, 
res. Bound Brook, m. a Ditmars, and has 4 ch.; Henry, res. Iowa. 
10. VI. ELEANOR, b. 3 Feb., 1772, d. about 1861, m. .first, 30 Oct., 1794, Cornelius 
Vliet, of New Germantown, by whom 2 sons; m. second, her brother- 
in-law, Martin Mehle, of Germantown, Pa., by whom 2 dau's. Eliza- 
beth and Mary Ann, both d. unm.; had ch. by first husband. 
I. Abraham M., b. in 1797, d. in 1868, m. in 1822, Ann, dau. of George 
Biles, of Warren Co., N. J. ; their 6 ch., Eleanor M., res. Frelinghuy- 
sen, Warren Co., N. J., b. 23 Aug., 182-3, m. W. H. Cook; Margaret, 
res. Frelinghuysen, b. 10 Mch., I82r>, m. Jonathan Lundy; Sarah E. 
r., b. 4 July, 1827, m. Gideon L. Albertson; William I)., res. Hack- 
ettstown, N. J., b. 24 Jan., 1829, m. Elizabeth Decker; their 3 ch., 
John, George and Rosella; Edna, h. in 1831, d. In 1834; Daniel, res. 
Hope, N. J., b. 13 Sep., 1833, m. flrst, in I860, Maria E., dau. of Robert 
Ayres, of Frelinghuysen. d. 12 Sep., 1864, by whom one ch. Anna 
M. ; m. second, in 1866, Mary E., dau. of Alexander Decker, of 
Blairstown, by whom 4 ch., Abraham M., Rosa E., Emma D. and 
Mary E. 
II. John, b. in 1798, d. in 1S41, m. in 1819, Rachel W. Werts, b. in 1800, d. in 
1883, their 10 ch.; Thomas Stewart, d. unm.; Eleanor A., res. Brook- 
lyn, N. Y., m. flrst Gilbert B. Stoothotf, by whom 9ch., m. second, B.. 
F. Sheppard, of Bridgeton, N. J. ; MehetaOle, res. Brooklyn, m. John 
Pearsall, dec, and has 9 ch. ; Peter If'., dec, unm.; Mary H'., dec; 



686 Ch. of J. Vlikt, Peter Melick & Moses Felmly. 

Maretta Louisa, res. Newark, ra. George Squire, and has 5 ch.; 
Amos M., d. unra., served in War of Rebellion; John, b. in 18.35, d. 
in 1889, m. Mary Chapman, had 5 ch., served in War of Rebellion, in 
14th Brooklyn Regt., returning as adjutant; Melinda J., res. 
Beattytown, Warren Co., N. J., m. Robert Martin, has 7 ch..\Enima 
Frances. 

11. VII. ABRAHAM, b. in 1776, d. 28 Nov., 1793. 

11. VIII. MARIA DOROTHEA (Dolly), b. 16 July., 1778, d. 30 Maj', 1803, m. 2 Apl., 
1795, John Vliet, of Bedminster, N. J.; had 2 ch. 
I. Eleanor, dec, m. a Frenchman and removed to Conn.; no ch. 
II. Simon J., b, in 1797, d. in 1875, m. Eliza, dau. of Nicholas Emmons, of 
Morris Co., N. J.; their 9 ch., Mary .Inn, res. Morristown, N. J., m. 
Jacob H. Lindabury, of White House, and had 5 ch., Henry, dec, 
Ricliard V., of Elizabeth, and F'rank, Isaac, and George B., of Mor- 
ristown; John, res. Peapack, b. in IS'ii, m. flr.^t, in 1845, Aletta W., 
dau. of Captain John Hoffman, of Cokesburg, N. J., b. in 1826, d. in 
1800, by whom 4 ch., m. secona, Martha J. Blazier, of Basking Ridge, 
N. J., by whom" 3 ch. ; Dorotliy Ellen, b. in 1823, d. in 1880, m. John B. 
Demond, b. in 1823, d. in 1877, and had 4 ch.; William S., b. in 1825, m. 
Dorothy Shai'p and has 2 ch.; Jacob E., b. in 1827, d. in 1847; Elsie, b. 
in 1839, d. in 1848; Isaac E., b. in 1831, d. in 1854; Richard, b. in 1835, d. 
in 1850; Sarah Ann, res. Peapack, N. J., in. Henry Kice, had 6 ch. 

FOURTH GENERATION (C). 

Peter Melick (5) had 9 ch. 

13. I. TUNIS, b. 15 Mch., 1784, d. 15 Oct., 1862, m. 18 May, 1805, Sarah, dau. of Andrew 

Van Syckle, of Tewksbury tp., Hunt. Co., N. J., b. 26 Oct., 1784, d. 22 
Jan., 1859. 

14. II. MARY, b. 4 Apl., 1786, d. 4 Aug., 1868, m. 2 Sep., 1809, Moses Felmly, of Tewks- 

bury tp., b. in 1789, d. 16 Nov., 1819; had 5 ch., 
I. David, res. Rockford, 111., b. 30 Sep., 1810, d. 3 Oct., 1853, m. in 18.34, 
Sarah, dau. of Maj. John Logan, of Peapack ; their 10 ch., John X., 
res. Cedar Falls, Iowa, b. in 1885, m. in 1855, Cynthia E. Davis, and 
has 3ch. living; Mary J., res. Rockford, 111., b. in 1836, ra. in 1854, 
William A. Davis and has 5 ch. living; Moses C, b. in 1838, killed in 
Dec, 1862, at battle of Murfreesboro, Tenn. ; Alinarin, b. 1840, d. in 
1858; M'illiam L., b. in 1842, m. in 1877, Sylvia S. Hall, no ch.. Susan 
A., res. Cedar Falls, Iowa, b. in 1844, m. in 1866, Stephen B. Collins, 
has 2 ch., he d. in 1866; Catherine and So}}hia, b. in 1840 and 1848, d. 
in infancy; Ellen, res. Cedar Falls, Iowa, b. in 18.50, m. in 1809, Rob- 
ert Sirling, has 10 ch. living; Sarah L., b. in June 1S52. unm. 
Susanna, b. 10 Nov., 1812, m. 27 Dec, 18.30, Morris J. Welsh, of Tewks- 
bury Tp., b. in 1799, d. in 1873. their G ch., Lydia An)i, b. in 1832, d. in 
1856, ra. in 1853, Peter P. Philhower, and left one ch., Sarah J., who 
ra. Abraham V. Honoj-man, of White House, N. J.; I'eter M., res. 
Bedminster, b. 1835, m. 1804, Margaret, dau. of William Houeyman, 
of Lamiugton, has5ch. ; Sarah ('., b. 1841, unm.; Jacob, res. Bed- 
minster, b. ia 1843, m. 1805, Sarah E., dau. of John I. Reger, of 
Tewksbury tp., has2ch. ; Morris J., res. Tewksbury tp., b. 1851, m. 
1873, Emma L., dau. of James O. Hughes, of Clinton, N. J., has 4 
ch.; Dorothy, b. 1854, m. 1873, James E. Ramsey, of Tewksbury tp., 
no ch. 

III. Petek M., b. 30 Nov., 1814, m. 14 Sep., 1836, Gertrude, dau. of Zachariah 

Smith, of Peapack, their 3 ch,, Edicin. res. Pleasant Run, b. 1837, m. 
18,59, Phebe A., dau, of Jolin I. Reger, of Tewksbury tp., and have 9 
ch.; Mary A)in, b. 1839, m. 1862, Abraham Van Cleef, of Somerset 
Co., have 4 ch. ; Clarissa, res. Fairmount, N, J., b. 1852, ra. 1872, Theo. 
Fisher. 

IV, John S., b. 5 Nov., 1816, d. 1 May, 1860, m. first, 1837, Ann M., dau. of 

Henry Stoothotf, of Bedminster, b. 1819, d. 185.3, by whom 4 ch.. 
Garret v., b. 1840, d. at City Point Hospital, Va., 20 June, 1864; 
Sarah S., res. Hailingen, N. J., b. 1843, m. 1869, Gordon N. J. Higgins, 
M. D., b. 1845, d. 1872, has 1 ch. ; Jonathan C, b. 1846, d. 1865; Morris W. 



Ch. of p. Melick, a. Van Sickle & Chas. Williams. 687 

b. 1840, is in U. S. A. John S. Felmley (IV), m. seconcl, 9 Aug-., 1854 
Ellen, dau. of Garret Voorhees, of Mine Brook, Somerset Co., b. 
1825; their 2 ch., David, res. Illinois, b. 1857, m. 1887, Auta Stout, 
has 1 ch.; John, res. Grig-gsville, 111., b. i860. 
V. Akthony M., b. 29 May. 1818, d. i Dec. 1873, m. first. 1838, Catherine, 
dau. of John Van Dyke, of Flanders, N. J., b. 1817, d. 1850, by whom 
2 dau., Maria Jane, ra. John B. Van Dyke, of Sedalia, Mo., and 
Siisanna, m. Austin Hoffman, of same place. Anthony M. (V), m. 
seconcl, 1858, Marj^aret, dau. of Henry Coi-telyou, of Bedminster, by 
whom 3 ch., William, d. unm. ; Mary, d. unm. ; and Sarali, d. 1876, 
m. Charle-s Courtney, of Sedalia; Anthony M. (V), m. third, Ade- 
line, dau. of James Park, of Tewksbury, N. J., b. 19 Aug-., 1831, by 
whom no ch. 
15. III. NICHOLAS EGBERT, b. 18 Aug., 1788, d. 23 Jan., 1872, m. first, 11 Apl., 1812, 
Elizabeth, dau. of Christopher Backer, b. 17 June, 1789, d. 21 Feb., 1852; 
m. second, Anna Krymer, wid. of John Rockf ellow, of Round Valley, 
N. J., b. 29 May, 1791, d. 4 Mch., 1872; no ch. by last wife; Nicholas 
Egbert (15) was a prominent citizen of Tewksbury tp., serving fre- 
quently as a county freeholder, member of town com., and as town 
collector; in 1824 he was one of the incorporators and trustees of the 
Methodist Episcopal Soc, of New Gei-mantown, N. J. For 10 ch. see p. 
C«9. 
10. IV. PETER, b. 2 Jan., 1791, d. 24 Jan.. 1873, m. 12 Jan., 181.3, Ruth, dau. of Amos 
Leake, of Chester, N. J., b. 8 Jan., 1703, d. 3 Nov., 1876; in 1832 he re- 
moved from New Jersey to Zanesville, Ohio, from there in 1847 to 
Owen Co., Indiana. For 13 ch. see p. 090. 

17. V. ABRAHAM, b. 4 Apl., 1794. d. 2 Jan., 1855, m. 1814, Mariah (Sarah S), dau. of 

Christian Kline (C 3-1), b. 23 June, 1797, d. 20 Dec, 1867. For 9 ch. see p. 
691. 

18. VI. JAMES, of Peapack, N. J., b. 21 Mch., 1705. d. '29 Apl., 1868, m. 20 Sept., 1817, 

Lydia. dau. of Andrew Van Sickle, of Readinglon, N. J., b. 30 Apl., 
1800, d. 27 Sept., 1874. For 7 ch. see p. 692. 
10. VII. JOHN v., of Bedminster, F. J., b. 7 Feb.. 1797 d. iMay. 1857, m. 7 Mch., 1818, 
Mariah Brunt Able, of Peapack, N. J„ b. 5 Apl., 1799, d. 31 Dec, 1885. 
For his 9 ch. see p. G93. 
2(1. VIII. ELEANOR, b. 1 Sept., 1799, d. 6 Apl., 1867, m. in 1818, Andrew Van Sickle, 
of Readinglon. N. J., b. 23 Mch. 1797, d. in Nov.. 18-48. About 1822 she 
removed with her husband to Tompkins Co., N. Y., later to Steuben 
Co.. where she died, had 6 ch,, 
I. Andrew, b. 15 May, 1819, d. 3 Jan., 1860, m. 1840, Sarah, dau. of James 

Kennedy, their 2 ch., Henry and John K. 
II. John M., res. Hornellsville, b. 13 Dec, 1820, m. 4 July, 1842, Ethylinda, 
dau. of Uriah NichoUs, of Mass., b. 3 Nov., 1819, their 3 ch., Robert 
L., b. 1843, d. 1SG3; Charles A., res. Hornellsville, b. 1848, m. 1876, 
Abbie Betts, 1 ch. dec; Emma, b. 1858, d. 1863. 

III. Hannah, b. 25 Feb., 18-2.3, d. 3 Dec, 1865, m. about 185.3, Robert Brun- 

dage, of Steuben Co., N. Y., their 2 ch., Frank, b. 1848, d. 1857, and 
Ella, b. about 1851. 

IV. Peter, b. 15 Apl., 182.5, d. 10 Dec, 1878, m. Susan, dau. of Alvah Mead, 

of Steuben Co., their 2 ch., Ellen and Sarah. 

V. Charles, b. 12 Mar., 1832, d. 20 Dec, 1868, ra. 1858, Sarah, dau. of Charles 

Coasting, of Steuben Co., their 1 ch., Ernest. 
VI. Nelson, b. 22 Sep., 1838, dec, m. Eliza dau. of Henry Harrison, of 
Alleghany Co., N. Y., 2ch.;both dec. 
21. IX. ELIZABETH, of Springdale, Ohio, b. 20 Nov.. 1801, d. 7 Jan., 18.52, m. 20 May, 
1821, Clyirles Williams, of New Gcrmantown, N. J., b. 12 Mch., 1797, d. 3 
May, 18(4, removed to Ohio about 1824; had ch. 
I. Edwin, of Grundy Co.. Mo., m. .first. 22 Sep.. 1844. Ann Adams, of 
Laurenceburg. Ind., b. 1820, d. 1872, by whom 8 ch., m. second, 8 Mar., 
1875, Mrs. Helen Berry, b. Maybee, of Grundy Co., by whom no ch.; 
had ch. by first wife. 

Eduun C, b. 1845. d. 1851; Ferdinand P., res. Browning. Sullivan 
Co., Mo., b. 24 Sep., 1847, m. 1873. Victoria A. Blackwood, b. in Jacn- 
son Co., W. Va.. 16 May, 1851, and has 5 ch.; Martin L., res. Custer 
Co., Montana, b. Aug.. 1850; Walter D., res. ScottsvlUe. Sullivan 



688 Ch. of Tunis Melick and Jacoh D. Trimmer. 

Co., Mo., b. 6 Apl., 18.52, m. 31 Jan., 1882, Mrs, Ella J. Smith, b. 
21 Sep., 1856, has one ch.; Martha Elizabeth, res. Keokuk, Iowa, 
b. 7 May, 1854, m. 20 Dec, 1871, E. H. Caywood. b. in Ohio, 1 Feb., 
1850, has4ch.; Cornelia B.. h. 1856, d. 1874; Charles, b. 1859, d. 1860; 
CJiarles T., b. 11 May, 1863 and another. 
II. Susan, of Clinton Co .,Ind., b. 12 June, 1823, d. 4 Dec, 1872, ra. flrst, 1842, 
John Emmons, of Preble Co., Ohio, b. 1811, d. 18o4, by whom 4ch.; 
m. second, 1856, Moses Davis, of Clinton Co.. and had 2 daus.. both 
deed. ; had ch. by first husband, Charles, res. Frankfort, Clinton 
Co., Ind., b. 12 Dec*, 1843, ra. Frances Lucas, who d. 1889, has 2 ch.; 
Elizabeth, b. 1845, d. 1875, in. 1805, Edward Miller, b. 1840, had 5ch.; 
William, res., Frankfort, Ind., b. 1847, m. 1872, Harriet V. McNelly, 
b. 18.54. has had 6 ch. ; Martha Jane. res. Frankfort, Ind., b. 1852, m. 
flrst, 1870, Samuel Moore, b. 1848, d. 1887, by whom .3 ch.. all dec; m. 
second, 1888, James Pickering, b. 1849. 

III. Thomas, b. 1825, d. 1832. 

IV. Peter M., res. Lonoke, Ark., b. 4 Mch., 1827, m. 6 Apl., 1853, Elizabeth 

Ann Lncas, of Clinton Co., Ind., their? ch., Xeictou L., b. ia54, m, 
1875, Josephine Cameron, has 3 ch. ; Reuben, b. 18.57, d. lS8^;Ja)i}es A., 
b. 18G3; Charles, b. 1808; Marion and ,Samint}ia (twins) b. 1872; John, 
b. 1877. 
V. Henry Clay, res. Hepler, Crawford Co., Kan., b. 25 Dec, 1828, d. 25 
Oct., 1824, m. 1852, Hannah Morris, of Ohio; their 2 ch.; Charles H., 
res. Cincinnati, O., b. 1853; Clarence, res. Hepler, Kan., b. 1867. 

VI. Isaac Newton, b. 18.30, m. Jirst, Maria Pinckley, of Ohio, by whom 4 
ch. ; CliOj-les; Elizabeth, dec; Edxjin and Xeicfon : Isaac Newton 
(VI.) m.se^mid, a widow, bOrn Susan Marpole, by whomSch., Peter, 
A nnie and John. He served from 1861 to the end of the Civil War In 
an Ohio Keg't-. 

Vll. Mary Jane, b. I8;i3, d. 1853. 
VIII. Elizaheth Ellen, res. Sprinjrboro, Warren Co., Ohio, b. 23 Jan., 1836, 
m. 8 Apl., 1858, Samuel Stowc, of Salera Co., N. J., b. 1831, d. 1884, 
their 7 ch., Morris, b. 1859, d. 1873; Edward, b. 1861; Mary Jane, b. 
1863; Charles \V., b. 1867; Clara B., b. 1870; Laura M., b. 1872; Louella, 
b. 1879. 

IX. Thomas, res. Platville, Taylor Co., Iowa, P. O. Athelstan, Mo., b. 28 
Mch., I8;i8, m. in 1861, Julia House, of Ind., their 6 ch., Caniillus; 
Morton; Ida; Charles; Elizabeth ; Mary. 
X. Susanna, b. 21 Dec, 1803. dec. m. Cornelius Mefore, of Readln^on, N. 
J., and removed to Steuben Co., N. Y., had at least 2 ch. 

XI. Catherine Ann, b. 1807, d. 1809. 

FIFTH GENERATION (C). 
Tunis Melick (13) had 3 ch. 
22. I. SUSANNA, b. 9 Sep., 1806, d. 28 Dec, 1868, m. 29 Apl., 1824, Jacob D. Trimmer, 
b. 12 Aujf., 1802, d. 27 July, 1864; bad ch. 
I. Anthony M., res. Clinton, N. J., b. 24 Jan., 1825, m. 23 May, 1847, Mary 
Maloney, of Phila., b. 27 Nov., 1835; their 2 ch., James M.; Mary A., 
who m. William C. Freeman, of Phillipsburg-, N. J. 
II. Sarah Ann, b. 1827, d, 1883, m. 1847, Archibald K. Johnston, b. 182;3; 
their 2 ch., Mary A., res. New Hampton, N. J., b. ia52, m. Charles A. 
Underwood, and has 4 ch.; yo^uojua. res. Glen Gardner, N. J., b. 
1857, m. J. Calvin Gardner. 

III. David W., d. in infancy. 

IV. Mary Elizabeth, b. 26 Mar., 1882, d. 28 June, 1866, unm. 

V. Ellen Anqeline, b. 25 Mch., 18.34, d. 24 Dec, 1884. m. 18 Mar., i858, Peter 

Todd, of Larain^on. N. J., present res. Lambert ville; no ch. 
VI. Peter W., res. Harford Mills, N. Y., b. 28 Dec, 1836. m. 19 Mch., 1862, 
Minerva L. Moore, of Liberty Corner, N. J., their 5 ch., Mamie 
E., b. 1863 is m.; Kate L., b. 1867, is ra.; Israel M., b. 1871; Augusta M., 
b. 1873; Lena B., h. 1877. 
. VII. Maria Louisa, res. Lambertville, N. J., b. 26 July, ls4o. m. 17 Jan., 

1861, John C. Swayze, b. 1833, d. 1882, their 4 ch. d. in Infancy. 
VIII. Andrew V. S., b. 26 Feb., 1842, d. In infancy. 



Ch. of a. V. S., NiCH. E., Peter W. & Jas. ^Jelick. 689 

IX. Martin Luther, b. 11 Aug-., 184.3, m. 16 Nov., 1869, Henrietta C, dau. of 

Stephen Beach, of Pluckamin, no ch. 
X. Jacob, A. W., b. -38 Aug-., 184H, d. 12 May, 1863. 
23. n. ANDREW VAN SYCKLE, b. 7 Feb., ISIO. d. 12 June, 1863, m. 17 Mar., 18.31, 
Rachel, dau. of John McKinsley, b. 15 Sep., 1811, d. 2 Mar., 188s, had 3 ch. 

I. Sarah Jane, i-es. Griggstown, N. J., b. 4 Aug., 1832, m. -29 Apl., 1858, 

Henry D. Wilson; their ch., I. Manj McKlnstry, b. 4 ApL, 1859, m. 
23 Aug., 1882, Abrara Williamson, res. Lebanon, N. J., has 3 ch; 
II. Andreio Luther, b. Sept., 1860, unm. 

II. Anthony, res. New Gerraantown, N. J., b. 27 June, 1834, ra. 3 Mch. 

1868, Joanna, dau. of J. Mehelm Brown, of Pluckamin, N. J.; 
their 2 ch., I. John M. B., b. 13 Sept., 1876; II. Anarew T. S., b. 23 
Aug., 1881. 
III. Andrew Luther, b. 6 Oct., 1842, d. 29 Apl., 186.3, at Acquia Creek, Va., 
while member of 31st Regt., N. J. "Vols. 
34. III. PETER WHITFIELD, res. Barnet Hall, New Germantown, N. J., b. 21 
Sep., 182.3, m. flrst, 15 Oct., 1844, Catherine C, dau. of Jacob Apgar, of 
New Germantown, by whom 10 ch, ; m. second, 27 Oct., 1870, Emma 
(Rea), widow of Charles Ilifif, of Kansas, b. Aug., 1845, by whom 2 ch. ; 
his 10 ch. by first wiie. 
I. Tunis de Witt, b. 31 Oct., 1845, m. 22 Feb., 187-2. Sarah M., dau. of Law- 
rence V. Studdiford, of South Branch, N. J., and has 7 ch., I. 
Lawrence S.; II. Caroline C; III. mraU L.; IV. Etta; V. Florence; 
VI. Tunis; VII. Edith. 
II. Sarah Elizabeth, b. 25 Feb., 1847, d. 19 Apl., 1849. 
III. Mary Josephine, b. 7 May, 1849, d. 19 May, 1850. ^ 
VI. Arabella, b. 13 Mch., 1851, d. 12 Feb., 186^. 
V. Franklin, res. Garden City, Kansas, b. 23 July, 1853, m. a Swede, and 
has 3 ch. 
VI. Gorilla, b. 23 Jan., 1856, d. 17 Oct., 1862. 

VII. Wilbur Fiske, res. Ross Forks, Idaho Ter., b. 26 Oct., 185S, unm. 
VIII. Georgiana, b. 3 Aug., 1861, d. in infancy. 
IX. George Washington, res. Denver, Col., b. 18 July, 1862, unm. 
X. Jacob Irving, res. Garden City, Kansas, b. 10 Nov., 1864, unm. 

Peter W. (24) had 2 ch. by second wife. 
XL Peter Whitefield, b. 17 Jan., 1873. 
XII. Martin Raub, b. 13 June, 1874. 

FIFTH GENERATION (C.J 

Nicholas Egbert Melick (15) had 10 ch. by first wife. 

25. I. PETER, b. 20 Nov., 1812, d. 21 May, 1878, m. flrst, 17 Apl., 1837, Jane Maria, dau. 

of Samuel Miller, of New Germantown, N. J., b. 7 Nov., 1815, d. 3 Aug., 
1861; by whom 4 ch., m. spcoucZ, 3 Mar., 1862, Kate, wid. of Siberno Q. 
Lar'rinaga, b, 16 Feb.. 182.3, d. 1877; no ch., m. third, in autumn of that 
year Urania Cummings, no ch. In 1859 he removed to Lincoln, 
Nebraska, where he became a justice of the peace and prominent in 
affairs. For 4 ch. see p. 694. 

26. II. CHRISTOPHER BACKER, res. Clinton, N. J., b. 31 Jan., 1815, m. 2 Nov., 

18.37, Maria V., dau. of Abraham Cortelyou, b. 30 Nov.. 1818, d. 3 Apl., 
1866. For his 10 ch. see p. 695. 

27. III. JOHN WESLEY, of 111., b. 18 July, 1817, d. 1871, m. Sep., 1841, Anne E., dau. 

of Jacob Apgar, of New Germantown, N. J., b. 9 Apl., 1822, d. 14 Apl., 
1888. 

28. IV. JAMES, res. New Germantown, N. J., b. 22 July, 1819, ra. 5 June. 1845. Enie- 

line M., dau. of Bernhardt S. Kennedy, and granddau. of Revd. Saral. 
Kennedy, Basking Ridge, N. J., b. 8 Jan., 18-23. <See pp. 159,402) had 5 ch. 
I. Annie E., b. l Oct., 1847. 

II. Egbert, b. 9 Feb., 1849, ra. 17 Jan., 1878, Palrayra Louise, dau. of Rich- 
ard Goodchild, artist; res., Bayonne. N. J. 

III. Edwin R., b. 2 May, 1850. 

IV. Louis M.. b. 14 Feb., 18.55, m. 20 Oct., 1887, Ella A., dau. of John Hoff. 

V. Adelaide K., b. 19 Sept., I86I, ra. 1 Jan., 1883, to Edward, son of David 
Park, b. 20 Oct., 1857, d. 10 Feb., 1884, res. New Germantown, N. J. 
44 



690 Cn. OF Pkter Melick of Owen Co., Indiana. 

29. V. SUSAN A., b. 16 July, 1822, d. Itl May, 1855, in. Sep., 1845, William Creger, of 

Lebanon, N. J.; had 2ch., 
I. Anne Elizabeth, b. 12 Mch., 1848, m. 18 Nov., 1876, George F. Case; no 
eh. 

II. John H., b. 27 Jan., 1852, m. 18 Nov., 1870, Louise J., dau. of George 

Apgar. 

30. VI. EDWIN, res. Clinton, N. J., b. 20 Sep., 1824, m. 8 Oct., 1850, Phebe E., dau. of 

Aaron Dunham, b, 12 Jan.. 1829; has one oh., 

I. Aaron Dunham, b. 31 Aug., 1851, m. June, 5 1889, Estelle, dau. of Revd. 

T. H. Jacobus, of Somervllle, N. J., 

31. VII. NICHOLAS T., d" In Infancy. 

32. VIII. WILLIAM J., res. 82 Congress St., Newark, b. 13 Nov., 1828, m. Jan., 1855, 

Mary E., dau. of Wm. B. Fisher, b. 28 Oct., 1856. 

33. IX. CATHERINE, res. Pottersville, N. J., b. 16 Mch., 1831, d. 10 Jan., 1867, m. 16 

Oct,, 1851. Stephen M. Wortmau, b. '23 Aug., 1827; he is an elder in the 
Reformed Church; had 7 ch. 
I. Mary E., b. 26 Sep., 1852, d. 28 Aug., 1854. 

II. Anna L., res. 86 Elm St., Newark, b. 26 June, 1855. m. 13 Dec, 1873, John 
Rowe, b. 24 July, 1844; their 6 ch., Achlie C, b. 1874; Mnry E., b. 1876, 
d. in infancy; Wm. W., b. 1878, d. 1882; Alice C, b. 1881; Uarold W., 
b. 1884; Hattie A., b. 1888. 

III. Mary, res. Callfon, N. J., b. 2 May, 1857, m. 1 Jan.. 1880, Aaron K. 

Creger, b. 19 Nov., 1853; their 2 ch., Lizzie, h. 1881, d. in infancy, and 
Herbert .V., b. 1886. 

IV. William M., res. Pottersville, b. 22 Dec, 1859, m. 17 Oct., 1883, Milly S., 

dau. George Pickel, b. 13 Maj', i860; their one ch., Vernon P., b. 1886. 
V. Marth'a, res. Peapack, N. J., b. 9 Jan., 1861, m. 6 Dec, 1882, Joseph M. 

Plckcl, b. 16 Sep., 1859; their one ch., Mamie V., b. 1883. 
VI. Egbert, b. 1862, d. 1804. 
VII. Kate, res. Pottersville, b. 11 Sep., 1864, m. 9 Nov., 1886, Henry M. Rar- 
ick, b. 11 Nov., 1863; their onech., Merryn tr., b. 1888. 

34. X. ELIZ.'VBETH L., b. 18 Apl., 1833, d. 23 Apl., 1876, m. 25 Dec, 1864. Samuel 

Sutton; had 9 ch., 
I. Esther anna, b. 14 Dec, 1855, d. 29 Mch., 1881, m. 29 Mch., 1879, had one 
dau. 
II. Catherine Louisa, res. New Germantown, b. 20 Feb., 1858, m. 8 Jan., 
1881, Wra. Cox; their 3 ch., Samuel Lewis, b. 1881; Stella Belle, b. 
1883; William Johnson, b. 1885. 

III. William E., b. 24 Aug., 1800, m. 24 Jan., 1885, Alice Apgar; no ch. 

IV. Emma Eliz'th, res. Bloomingdale, Passaic Co., N. J., b. 19 Sep., 1862, 

m. 25 Dec, 1883, George H. Ma.xfleld; their 2 ch., John, b. 1884, and 
William, b. 1887. 
V. Egbert Melick, b. 1S64, d. in infancy. 
VI. Edwin Melick, b. 22 Apl.. 1867. 
VII. Mary Woktman, b. 19 July, l87o. 
VIII. Samuel Lincoln, b. 2 May, 1873. 
IX. Jenny P., b. 1875, d. in infancy. 

FIFTH GENERATION (C.) 

Peter Melick (i6) had 13 ch. 

35. I. MARTIN MEHL., res. Cuba, Owen Co., Ind., b. 9 Sep., 1814, m. 30 Mch., 1843. 

Martha Parrish, b. 11 Nov., 1824. For 8 ch. see p. 695. 

36. II. MARTHA, res. Cuba, b. 2 Feb., 1816, unm. 

37. III. ELIZABETH, res. Zanesville, Ohio, b. 11 Oct.. 1817, ra. 26 Mch.. 1844, Peter 

Flesher, who d. 10 Dec, 1886; had 4 ch., 
I. Nancy, res. Zanesville, O., b. 34 Feb.. 1845. m. 20 May. 1869. Perry Red- 
man; their 2 ch., Arthur B., b. 1870. and Charles W., b. 1872. 

II. Samantha, res. Newark, Ohio, b. 28 Aug., 1846, m. 17 Jan., 1878. Milton 

Smith, no ch. 

III. John Wesley, res. Zanesville, b. 9 Aug., 1848, m. 29 June, 1880. Matilda 

Urania Klne. no ch. 

IV. Ruth Ellen, b. 1850, d. 187T, no ch. 

88. IV. NANCY, of Johnson Co., Ind., b. 21 Nov., 1819, d. 17 Dec, 1881, va.Jlrst, 1840, 
Wm. Wood, of Ohio, who d. about 1850; m. second, 1851, Isaac Farrand. 



Ch. of Abraham Melick of Hunterdon Co., N. J. 691 

of Ind., who d. about 1866; m. thira, Wm. St. Johns, of Terre Haute, 
Ind. ; ra. fourth, Joseph T. Hall, of Franklin, Ind. ; no ch. 

39. V. PETER, res. Freedom, Owen Co., Ind., b. 22 ApL, 1822, m. 16 Dec, 1852, Kate 

Blair, b. in Tenn., 31 Oct., 1828; has one ch. 
I. James Richard, b. l Sep., 1885, and is m. 

40. VI SUSAN, res. Fish Creek, Madison Co., Mont. Terr., b. 13 Feb., 1824. m. 1850' 

Andrew J. Rundell, of Ind., has 7 ch. 
I. Geoboe A., b. 18 Mch., 1858, m. 18 Nov., 1880, Sarah E. Ravenscroft. 
II. Whitfield, b. 18 Aug., 1852. 

III. Charlotte Melinda, b. 12 Aug., 1857, m. 23 May, 1878, E. E. Rennlx. 

IV. Henry M.. b. 23 June, 1859, m. 31 Dec, 1886, Dolly Sarry. 

V. Finley H., b. 23 Nov., 1861. 

VI. Alice M., b. 8 Feb.. 1864, m. 5 Nov.. 1882, F. H. Scott. 
Vn. Rosa L., b. 21 Oct., 1865, m. 10 Dec, 1882, E. E. Baker. 

41. VII. CHARLOTTE, res. Cuba, b. 21 Oct., 1825 m. flrsl, 1862, Walker Ennis, Df 

Ind., who d. in 1879, m. second, 1882, David Coble, of Indiana, no ch. 

42. VIII. JOHN, res. Cuba, b. 29 Mch., 1827, m.iir.sC, 185.3, Sarah Gaston, b. 1829, d. 

1881, m. second, 1882, Mary Ellen Wright, by whom no ch. ; had 3 ch., by 
first wife. 
I. James, b. 1854, d. in infancy. 

II. William M., res. Spencer, Owen Co., Ind., b. 3 July, 1856, m. Jlrst, 4 
July, 1882, Amanda Spears, who d. 1884, by whom one son, Alvin R., 
b. 1884; m. second, 1886 Belle Hickson. 
ni. Henry, res. Lyons, Green Co., Ind., b. ApL, 1861, m. Sep., 1885, Rosa 
Gillespie, from whom div. ; no ch. 

43. IX. MARY ELLEN, res. Cuba, b. 25 Feb., 1829, m. 22 Apl., 1855, Washburn Ennis 

of Ind., from whom div., 1887; had 8 ch., 
I. Ruth Ellen, b. 1 Mch., 1856. 
II. Walker, b. 16 Dec, 1857. 

III. Jerusha Ann, res. Romney, Tippecanoe Co., Ind., b. 21 Feb., 1860, m. 

19 Feb., 1880, Marcus Lafayette Spratt; their 4ch., Bertha H., b. 
1881; Cena Alice, b. 1883; Emma Gertrude, b. 1884; Anna B., b. 1887. 

IV. Rosa Florence, b. 1862, d. in infancy. 
V. Alfred O., b. 1 Apl., 1865. 

VI. Theodore C, b. 23 Oct., 1867. 
VII. an infant twin bro. d. unm. 

VIII. Tunis W., b. 28 Nov., 1870. 

44. X. RUTH, res. Cuba, b. 10 Aug., 1832, m. 21 Aug.. 1850, R. J. Rundell, of Ind. ; 

had G ch., 
I. Peter F., b. 29 July, 1851, d. 15 ApL, 1889, m. 1872, Samantha F. Cant- 
well ; their 3 ch.. Ernest E.. b. 1875 : Herbert, b. 1880; Elsie, b. 1887. 
II. Alviba, b. 22 Mch., 1855, d. 5 Jan., 1889, m. 30 Nov., 1877, Shelton Ennis; 
their 1 ch., Grace, h. 1878. 

III. Riley S., res. Indian Ter., b. 26 Aug., 1856, m. 1870, Elnora Criss; their 

3 ch.. Bertha, b. 1879; Ossie, b. 1880; Otis, b. 1881. 

IV. Cynthia A., res. Morgan Co., Ind., b. 6 Jan., 1858, m. 2 Oct., 1882, John 

Flake; no ch. 
V. Elma E., i-es. Morgan Co., Ind., b. 26 Aug., 1859, m. 16 Dec, 1882, Alice 
Glover; their 3 ch., Bertie, b. 1884; Pearl B., b. 1886; and a baby, b. 
1888. 

VI. Minnie B., b. 10 Jan., 1869. 

Peter (16) had 3 other ch. who d. in infancy. 

FIFTH GENERATION (C.) 
Abraham Melick (17) had 9 ch. 

45. I. LUCETTA, res. Paterson, N. J., b. 4 ApL, 1815, ra. Garret C. Post, who is 

dec. ; had ch., 
I. Mary Katherine, res. Paterson, m. Wm. King; their one ch., ADra- 

ham. 
II. Sarah, m. John Crown, who is dec. ; their 5 ch., Ze7io; Abraham; John; 
Buddie; Xellv, m. Frank Arrison, of Paterson. 

46. II. ELLEN, b. 16 Mar., 1817, d. 1871, m. first, Joseph Clearwater, of Paterson, 

who Avas drowned in Lake Hopatcong; m, second, Lawrence Hagar, of 
German Valley, N. J., dec. ; no ch. 



692 Children of James Melick of Peapack, N. J. 

47. ni. ELIZABETH M., b. 4 Dec, 1820, m. 1844, William Courter, of Paterson; 

their 5 ch., 
I. Altheus, m. Carrie Haslar. no ch. 
II. SiBEHNO, G. L., res. Rutherford, N. J., m. Emma Consaul; their 2 ch. 

Altheus, and Edith. 
III. Emma, res. Elizabeth, N. J., m. James Harris; their 3 ch.; DeWitt; 
WiUielinina; Jane Elizabeth. 
IV. V. Two sons d. in infancy. 

48. IV. CATHERINE, b. 1823, d. 1877, m. ^nsr Siberno G. Larrinai?a, a Cuban; m. 

secoml, i Meh., 1862, Peter Melick (C. 2.)), of Lincoln, Neb., no ch. 

49. V. MARY, res. Chester, N. J., b. 24 Mch., 1826, m. Joseph Berry ; their 4 ch. 

I. Ella, m. Richard Engelman, of Peapack, N. J. 
II. Sabina, ni. Richd. Treadway, of Chester. 

III. Abraham. 

IV. Jane. 

50. VI. JOSEPH H., res. Joilet, 111., b. 15 Sep., 1838, ra. Jlrst. 4 Nov., 1856, Mary E., 

dau. of John Bosenbury, of New Germautown N. J., m. second, 1876, 
Mary, dau. of Gai-ret L. Emmons, of N. G., by whom no ch.; had ch. 
by first wife. 
I. Abraham, b. 5 Feb., 1858, d. 15 Jan., 1861. 

II. Clara, b. 12 Apl., 18G0, m. 10 Dec, 1879, Israel Howell, of Hopewell, N. 
J., no ch. 

III. Robert D., res. Chicag-o, 111., b. 11 Feb., 1862, unm. 

IV. Anna DeVVitt, b. 12 Dec, 1804, m. 24 May, 1887, Abraham Hall, of New 
Germautown; their one ch., Allen H., b. 1888. 

51. VII. WILLIAM C, res. Newark, N. J., b. 10 Sep., 1833, m. 13 Oct., 1858, Harriet, 

dau. of Garret L. Emmons, of New Gerraantown, b. 9 Nov., 1837, d. 25 
June, 1886; had ch., 

I. Emma Deloua, b. 1859, m. Georg-e Duran, of Newark, N. J., their one 

ch. d. lu infancy. 

II. Jerome E., res. Newark, b. 7 Dec, 1800, unm. 

III. Abraham Lincoln, res. Newark, b. 2 Jan., 1863, unm. 

IV. Jenny, b. 18 Nov., 1866, m. Edg-ar L. Courter, of Newark. 
V.l Lizzie, b. 10 May, 1873. 

VI. William, b. 3 Oct., 1877. 
62. VIII. ANGELINE, b. 1830, d. 1832. 

53. IX. EMMA R., res. Paterson, N. J., b. Aug., 1837. 

FIFTH GENERATION (C.) 
James Melick (i8) had 7 ch. 

54. I. PETER v., b. 14 Aug., 1818, d. 1848, at Toledo, O., m. 1 Nov., 1838, Elizabeth, 

dau. of Capt. Henry A. Post, of Reading-ton, N. J., b. 9 Feb., 1820; had 
4ch. 
I. Martha Ann, b. 1839, d. 1882, m. Peter Sutphen, of North Branch, N. 

J.; their 10 ch., Augusta; Anna, m. Charles Stevens, of Plaintield; 

N. J., \f'ilson; Elizabeth; Alice; Emma; Jane; Mary; Susan; Joseph. 

II. James Henry, res. Somerville, N. J., b. 3l May, 1841, m. Sarah Ann, 

dau. of Joseph S. Ten Eyck, of South Branch, N. J.; their 5 ch., 
Oeorrje A., b. 13 Oct., 1865; William T., b. 15 Oct., 1866; Stephen H., b. 
1868, d. 1888; Uary Ella, b. 19 May, 1870; Eva T., b. 1872. d. 1874. 

III. George Anderson, b. 27 June, 1843, a private in 2nd N. J. Cavalry 

during Civil war, captured in Tenn. and confined at Andereon- 
villc, Ga., afterwards at Florence, S. C, where he is supposed to 
have died. 

IV. Mary Jane, res. Killisca, Iowa, b. 22 July, 1846, m. Lewis E. Ellick; 

their 5 ch., Charles, d. 1884; Annie P.; George A.; John D.; Frank. 
55.'_ II. ANTHONY, of Peapack, N. J., b. 1 Aug., 1820, d. May, 1851, m. 1842, Jane 
Dalley, of Bedminster: their 2 ch., 

I. I^YDiA, b. 1847, m. Dr. Erastus Marshall, of Mass., who is dec. ; no ch. 

II. Susan Ann, b. 1849, d. 1874, unm. 

66. JUL ■ REBECCA, b. 3 Sep., 1822, d. 4 July, 1868, m. 1841, Isaac L. Philhower, of 
Peapack, N. J., had 5 ch., 
I. John, res. Peapack, b. 1842, m. Marj-, dau. of Silas Thompson, of Men- 
dham, N. J.; has 2 ch. 



Ch. of David B., John L., John V. ^s: Peter Melick. 693 

II. Isaac, res. Peapack, m. Matilda, dau. of Adrian H. Picket, of White 
House, N. J.; has one ch. 

III. Lewis, b. 14 Oct., 1857, d. '27 Apl., 1879. 

IV. Emily, b. i860, d. 1868. 
V. Cyrus, res. Florida. 

57. IV. DAVID BARTINE, of Peapack, N. J., b. 1.3 May, 1825, d. 4. Jan., 1880, m. 30 

Nov., 1859, Mary A., dau. of Robert Woodruff, of Mendham, N. J., b. 18 
May, 1840, had 4 ch., 
I. James Robert, b. 28 Oct., i860, d. 2 Aug., 1884. 
II. George Woodruff, res. Montclair, N. J., b. 24 Aug., 1868. 

III. Mary Caroline, b. 2 Oct., 1870. 

IV. David Bartine, b. 13 May, 1S72. 

58. V. ANDREW VAN SYCKLE, b. 11 June, 1829, d. Sep., 1867, in California, leav- 

ing a wife, 4 sons, and 1 dau., who remain there. 

59. VI. SUSAN, res. Peapack. N. J., b. 3 June. 1832, rn. 14 Dec, 1853, Elias Phil- 

hower, b. 28 May, 18.32; had 4 ch., 
I. Annie, b. 22 Aug., 1850, m. 3 Apl., 1876, AmosBIain, of Peapack; has 5 
ch. 
II. Laura, b. 28 Feb., 1858, m. 14 Nov., 1877, Jonathan Tharpe, of Peapack, 
had 5 ch. 

III. Emma Jane, b. 6 Apl., 1863, m. 3 Feb., 1883, Elmer De Kyne; has 3 ch. 

IV. Rachael, b. 17 Oct., 1867, m. 31 Dec, 1885, James Rodenbaugh, of Clin- 

ton, N. J.; has 1 ch. 

60. VII. JOHN LENHART, of Peapack, N. J., b. 5 May, 1835, d. 25 Feb., 1870, m. 1 

Sep., 1858, Angeline, dau. of Jacob Petrie, of Peapack; had 5 ch., 
I. Augusta, b. 1861, m. a Lindaberry, of Tewksbury, and had one ch., 
Edna. 
II. Eli, res. Pottersville, N. J., b. 11 June, 1863, ra. 1885, Fanny, dau. of 
Abraham Cole, of Peapack; their 1 ch., A(Ulie, b. 1888. 

III. Bertha, b. in 1865, unm. 

IV. John, b. Feb., 1868. 
V. Mary, b. in 1872. 

FIFTH GENERATION (C). 

John V. Melick (19) had 9 ch. 

61. I. PETER, res. Mendham, N. J., b. 27 Nov., 1821, ra. 14 Sep., 1842, Margaret, dau. 

of Cornelius La Tourette, b. 10 Aug.. 1823; had 6 ch. 
I. Maria Jane, b. 28 Sept.. 184.3, m. 28 Oct., 1868, John L. Denton, b. 29 

July, 1843; res. Cuba. Mo. 
II. Gertrude, b. 23 Aug., 1845, d. 13 May. 1882, m. 21 July, 1863, E. A. Weeks, 
b. 2Mch, 1839; res. Somerville, N. J.; had ch.. 1. Charles F., b. 23 
Sept., 1864, d. 30 July. 3807; II. Wilbur Kelsey, b. 23 Oct., 1871; III. 
Louis Berge, b. 28 Nov., 1873. 

III. Elizabeth, b. 10 June, 1848, d. 20 July, 1887, in. 20 Jan.. 1878, John M. 

Crane, b. 3 May, 1842 ; res. Mendham, N. J. ; had ch., I. John 
Samuel, b. 25 Feb., 1880; II. llowara Claytnu. b. 21 Nov., 1882. 

IV. Anna, b. 29 July, 1850, m. William Ballentine, b. 6 Dec, 1858; res. Irvintr- 

ton, N. J.; had ch., I. Letui, b. 16 Au?., 1874; II. Jane, b. 29 Feb., 
1876; III. Raijuiona Peter, b. 26 Oct., 1876, d. 27 July, 1878; IV. Mar. 
garet, b. 28 May, 1886. 

V. Ella, b. 6 Apl., 1858, d. 3 June, 1865. 

VI. John Walter, b. 29, Nov., 1S62, m. Annie V. D. Fleury, b. 3 Mch., 1868; 

res. Morristown, N. J. ; had ch., I. Victor Reyinond, b. .3i) May. 1887. 

62. II. WILLIAM TBNNENT, res. Peapack, N. J., b. 4 Apl., 1821. m. 8 Dec, 1812, 

Rachel Ann, dau. of John Philhower, of Peapack, b. 19 June, 1825, had 
3 ch. 
I. Harriet Ann, b. 13 Dec. 1843, m. Jacob Flomerfelt, of Peapack; their 
6 ch. miliam T., b. 12 May, 1867; FreaericK T., b. 1871. d. 1875; Laura 
JJf., b.28 May, 1876;7fru'7(i'(f? Jf., b. 21 Jan., 1878; JrtHie.s A,, b. 21 July. 
1885; Cyrus X., b. 1887, d. in infancy. 
II. Cyrus H., res. Newark, b. 18 Oct., 1845, m. Sarah, dau. of Zacharlah 
Flomerfelt, of Peapack; their 3 ch., Kra, h. 2 Aug., 1868; J. Walter, 
b. 16 Feb., 1870: Witliain Tennent, b. 15 Aug., 1873. 



694 Ch. of Wm. T., Ernest E., and John V. Melick. 

III. Laura v., b. 7 Dec. 1852, d. 24 Apl-, 1882, m. Henry Savagre, of Peapack; 
their 1 ch., J. Chester, b. 2 Nov., 1878. 

63. SUSAN E., res. New Germantown, N. J., b. 14 Aug., 1828, m. 21 Feb., 1850. John 

Lane; had Gch. 
I. Anna Lavinia, b. 27 Jan., 1850, m. l June, 1870, Ellas Miller, of Pottera- 
vllle, N. J.; their 4 ch., Lizzie, d. in Infancy, Lillie Alniita; Emma 
L. ; Raymond P. 

II. Ernest E., res. Plucliamin, N. J„ b. 5 Sept., 1852, m. 24 Ocf, 1877, Abby 

Louisa, dau. of Elisha Waldron, of New Germantown; their 2 ch., 
Maud \V.; L'dith Louisa. 

III. Louisa, M.. b. 7 July, 1854, m. 26 Nov., 1873, Peter V. Vroom, of 

Pluckamln; their 4 ch., Jo?m W., Margaret L., Charles P., Susan 
Bernetta. 

IV. John Warren, b. 1859. d. 1864. 

V. Matthew Raymond, res. New Germantown, b. 2 Nov., 1864. 
VI. Emma Elizabeth, b. 4 May, 1867. 

64. IV. JANE, res. Newark. N. J., b. 5 Mar.. 1830. m. 15 Dec, 1849, Andrew Smith 

Cole, of Peapack, N. J., who d. 27 Nov., 1875; had 6 ch. 
I. John H., res., Westfleld. N. J., b. 9 July, 1851, m. Dec, 1872, Ada Pound; 
their 2 ch., Victor, Beulah. 

II. Lillie Willana, b. 27 Nov., 1853, m. 1872, Philetus Smith, of N. Y. C; 

their 2 ch.. Clarence; Harold. 

III. Charles I., res. Newark. N. J., b. 3 Sept., 1855, m. 1881, Minnie Benedict, 

their 2 ch., Millicent, FranK. 

IV. Alvan, res. California, b. 3 Oct., l857, m. 1885, Cetha B. Martin, of Cal.; 

no ch. 
V. Andrew F., res. Newark, b. 22 Nov., 1859, unm. 
VI. Kate Frances, b. 10 Aug., 1863, m. 14 Nov., 1883, Orlando W. Young, of 

Newark; no ch. 
VII. Jennie Man. b. 1869. d. 1871. 
65. V. ERNEST E.. res. New Germantown, N. J., b. 30 Jan.. 1832. m. 2 Mar., 1854, 
Fannie T., dau. of David T. Hoffman, of Potterstown, N. J., had 
5ch. 

I. John E. V., res. Springfield, 111., b. 1 Sept., 1855, m. 2 Dec, 1879. Frances 

Althea Sprague; no ch. 

II. Peter P., res. Kansas City, Mo., b. 9 July, 1859, m. 10 Jan., 1888, Jennie 

Cardegan, of 111., b. 10 Sept., 1864. 

III. Arten "W., b. 26 Sept., 1865. 

IV. Caius Cassius, res. New Germantown, b. 12 Mar., 1868. 
V. Serosa, b. 18 June. 1873. 

66. VI. MARIA LAVINIA. b. 5 Feb., 1834, m. 14 Feb., 1856, Austen Clark, of New 

Germantown, had3ch. 
I. Samuel, res. Morristown, N. J., m. Harriet, dau. of Peter Apgar. of 

Peapack. and has 1 ch. 
II. Sallie, m. James Apgar, of Peapack, and has 3 ch. 
III. Maggie. 

67. VII. JOHN v., res. New Germantown, N. J., b. 25 Nov., 1836. m. 28 Mar., i860, 

Margaretta, dau. of John Craig, of New Germantown, b. in 1839; had 
3ch. 
I. John Elmer, res. Brooklyn, L. I., b. 8 Sept., 1861, unm. 
II. Walter Cameron, b. i Jan., 1863; unm. 

III. EUDORA Eloise, b. 22 Jan.. 1865. unm. 

68. VIII. EMELINE, res. New Germantown, b. 4 May, 1843, m. 1 Jan., 1868, Jacob 
Specht, b. 1837, their 1 ch., Everetta, b. 1869 

69. IX. SARAH, b. 1 April, 1845. d. in infancy. 

SIXTH GENERATION (C). 
Peter Melick (25) had 4 ch. 

70. I. MARY ELIZABETH, b. 8 Jan.. 18.38, ra. 28 Feb., 1861, Adam Harriman, b. 17 

Mch.. 18.34; had 11 ch., I. Lily J., b. 23 Sept.. 1861; IL Fanny K.. b. 6 
Dec. 1862, d. 20 Feb., 1864; III. Charles, M. D., b. 15 Feb., 1865; IV. 
Samuel E., b. 6 Sept., 1867; V. Micha E., b. 7 Jan.. 1869; VI. Eugene 
O.. b. 7 Jan., 1871; VII. Ethel M., b. 8 Oct., 1872; VIII. Lizzie A., b. 



Ch. of p. Melick of Neb., C. B. of N. J., & M. M. of Ind. 695 

1874, d. 1 Apl., 1878; IX. Alexander, b. 8 Feb., 1877; X. Lulu M., b. 4 
June, 1879; XI. Milleb, b. 17 Sept., 1881, d. 14 Mcb., 1882. 
71. II. EMMA J., b. 31 Jaa., 1813, m. 18 Mch., 1873, Wavrea Hallet, b. 15 Feb., 1833; 
had 3ch., I. Maggie C, b. 30 Dec, 1875, d. 26 July, 1880; II. Oliver, b. 2 
Oct., 1877. 

72. III. NICHOLAS EGBERT, res. Davey, Lancaster Co.. Neb., b. 25 Aug., 1847, m. 

38 Mch., 1873, Priscilla, dau. of James M. Scott, b. 13 Dec., 1845; Nicholas 
Egbert was justice of the peace for 6 years following 1882; has had 8 
ch., I. Egbert, b. 23 Mch., 1873, d. in infancy; II. Katie M., b. 9 June, 
1874; III. Caroline M., b. 12 Nov., 1875; IV. Chas. Wesley, b. 20 May, 
1877; V. Frank E., b. 2 Dec, 1878; VI. Emma Priscilla, b. 8 Nov., 1880; 
VII. Bertha Lucilla, b. 24 June, 1882; VIII. Marion Maud, b. 5 Nov., 
1883. 

73. IV. SAMUEL M., b. 24 Mch. 1850, res. Lincoln, Neb., now (1888) and has been for 

6 years sheriff of Lancaster Co.; m.jlrst, 25 Feb,, 1869, Maria F., dau. of 
Philip Og-an, b. 1. Jan., 1848. d. 19 June, 1880; m. second, 29 Dec, 1881, 
Mrs. Catherine Langdon Dewey, dau. of Milton Langdon, b. 29 Mch., 
1856; had ch. by first wife; I. Minnie M., b. 4 Dec, 1870; II. May E., b. 13 
Mch.. 1872; III. Walter W., b. 12 Apl., 1873; IV. Samuel M. Jr., b. 14 
Nov., 1874, d. 10 Aug-., 1875; V. Nellie J., b. 8 Feb., 1876, d. 9 Apl., 1879; 
VI. Urania R., b. 17 May, 1878, d. 15 Apl., 1879. 

SIXTH GENERATION (C.) 
• Christopher Backer Melick (26) had 10 ch. 

74. 1. ELIZABETH, res. Pittstown, N. J., b. 28 Sep., 1838, m. 18G8, Martin Frace; has 

one dau. 

75. II, ABRAHAM C, b. 2 Jan., 1840, d. 12 Apl,, 1857. 

76. III. N. THEODORE, res. Clinton, N. J., b. 5 Aug., 1841, m. 19 Dec, 1366, Cather- 

ine Ann, dau. of Elias W. Haver, of Lebanon, N. J. 

77. IV. ELLEN L., b. 25 Mch., 1843. unm. 

78. V. JOHN WESLEY, res. Clinton, N. J., b. 29 Feb.. 1845, ra. May, 1863, Susan J., 

dau. of James Boss, of Clinton. 

79. VI. LAURA ANN, b. 28 Dec, 1848, unm. 

80. VII. CATHERINE C, res. Pittstown, N. J., b. 24 June, 1852, m. 6 Dec, 1876, 

David M. Bird; has 3 ch. 

81. VIII. WILLIAM KELLY, res. Clinton, b. 1 Sep., 1854, m. 14 June, 1876, Minnie 

A., dau. of Isaac K. Demott, of Clinton; she d. Mch., 1887. 

82. IX. ALICE EMELINE, res. Jutland, N. J., b. 19 Apl., 1856, m. 27 Nov., 1879, 

Theodore Housell; has one dau. 

83. X. PHCEBE GARETTA, res. Cherryville, N. J., b. 5 Oct., 1859, ra. 15 Dec, 1880, 

William K. Hoffman. 

SIXTH GENERATION (C.) 
Martin Mehl Melick (35) had 8 ch. 

84. I. CYNTHIA A., of Quincy, Owen Co., Ind., b. 22 Apl., 1844, d. 4 Oct., 1885, m. 18 

Dec, 1865, William H. Steel; had 8 ch., I. Adolphus M., res. Peters- 
burg, Pike Co., Ind., b. 27 Nov., 1866; II. John S., b. 27 Aug., 1868; IIL 
Margaret E., b. 18 Aug., 1871; IV. Della M., b. IG July, 1873; V. Flos- 
sie M., b. 18 Dec, 1875; VI. William J., b. 3 Nov., 1877; VII. Dasie. b. 
8 Aug., 1881; VIII. DoviE A., b. 5 May, 1884. 

85. II. WILLIAM J., res. Cataract, Owen Co., Ind., b. 1 Aug., 1S45, m. 27 Feb., 1868, 

Sarah Ennis; had 8ch., who all d. in Infancy. 

86. III. RUTH T., res. Spencer. Owen Co., Ind., b. 16 Jan., 1848, m. 1870, William H. 

Medarls; ha8 9ch., I. Minnie, b. 1870; II. Charles, b. 1872; III. Lessik 
M., b. 15 Apl., 1873; IV. Orib L., b. 30 Sep., 1S74; V. Stephen C, b. 8 
July, 1875; VI. Luther, b. 3 P'ob., 1877; VII. Thomas E., b. 10 Jan., 1879; 
VIII. Martha, b. 15 Mch., 1882; IX. William R., b. 4 Oct., 1885. 

87. IV. MARY E., res. Spencer, Ind., b. 11 Oct., 18>0, ra. 20 Oct., 1874, Ozias W. 

Evans; has 4 oh.. I. Oscar, b. 30 Nov., 1876, II. Luther J., b. 6 Mar., 
1879; III. Winfield H., b. 31 May, 1885; Emmett E., b. 9Mch., 1887. 
«8. V. CATHERINE C, of Danville. Ind., b. 26 Nov., 1854, d. 19 Dec, 1882, ra. 14 
Dec, 1878, Levi H. Brown; no ch. 



696 David Melick of New Germantown, N. J. 

89. VI. EMMA E., res. Pike Co., Ind., b. 6 Mch.. 1856, m. 18 Dec, 1879, Oliver P. 

Hackathorue; has 2 ch., I. Ada L., b. 24 Mch., 1881; II. Dalton H., b. 
20 July. 188V. 

90. VII. LUTHER M., res. Cuba, Ind., b. 25 Nov., 1859. 

91. VIII. THEODORE T.. res. Cuba, Ind., b. 23 Aug., 1862, m. 12 Feb., 1885, Ida L. 

Corns; has2ch., I. Goldie A., b. 24 Nov., 1885; Gladys G., b. 7 Dec.. 
1886. 



JOHAN DAVID MOELICH (DAVID MELICK) (D). 

of Hunterdon Co., N. J., and his descendants. 

1. JOHAN DAVID MOELICH was the son of Hans Peter (VIII) of Bendorf on the 

Rhine, and the grandson of Jonas (V), who migrated to that place from 
Winningen on the Moselle, in 1G88. David Melick, as he was known in 
later life, was born 12 Oct., 1715, in Bendorf; with that his record ends 
in Germany. The date of his emigration to America is unknown, but 
he next appears as a trustee in 1740, of Zion Lutheran church in New 
Germantown, in Lebanon, now Tewksbury township, Hunterdon Co., 
N. J., and in 1757 was one of the two church wardens of that congrega- 
tion. His wife was probably named Elizabeth, as Elizabeth Melick, a 
widow, stood sponsor at the baptism of David, the eldest child of his 
son Christian. David's (1) eldest brother Jonas, b. 27 July, 1710, d. in 
Mch., 1788, probably came with him to America, as this brother was also 
a prominent member of Zion Lutheran congregation at New German- 
town, and in 1755 was elected the first constable of the newly formed 
I township of Tewksbury. David died about the year 1764; he certainly 

had four children perhaps more, (see pp. 79, 628.) 

SECOND GENERATION (D). 

David Melick (i) had 4 children. 

2. I. CHRISTIAN, often called Christopher, b. in 1744, d. in 1788, m, Anna, dau. of 

Balthazar Pickel, 2d, and granddau. of Balthazar Pickel, of White 
House, and of Zion Congregation, New Germantown, N. J. She was 
born 9 Apl., 1749, d. in N. Y. city, 23 Jan., 1823, as the widow of Rev. 
William Graff, of New Germantown, and is burled at Lebanon, N. J., 
Christian spent most of his life in Tewksbury township, removing 
shortly before his death to Woodbridge, Middlesex Co., where he is 
buried, his tombstone being marked Christopher. For his 6 ch. see 
p. 696. 

3. II. PETER, b. in 1754, d. 17 Nov., 1829, m. Hannah Gillespie. For his 6 ch. see 

p. 697. 

4. III. LEONARD, b. in 1760, d. at Oak Tree, near Plainfleld, N. J., in 1813. m. Mary 

Glaspey, of Woodbridge, N. J. For his 7 ch. see p. 698. 

5. IV. A DAUGHTER, who m. Peter Hendershot, and who d. in Sept., 1778, and 

is buried in the Lutheran graveyard at New Germantown. 

THIRD GENERATION (D). 

Christian Melick (2) had 6 ch. 

6. I. DAVID, of New Germantown, N. J., (sometimes called "Captain David,") b. 

29 Nov., 1767, the sponsors at his baptism being Christian Sturm and 
Elizabeth Melick, d. at res. of his brother Balthazer, in N. Y. city, 5 
Nov., 1825, buried at Lebanon, N. J., ra. 12 Oct., 1794, Margaret, dau. 
of John Swollotr, of New Germantown. For his 6 ch. see p. 698. 

7. II. BALTHAZER. P., of New York city, b. 26 Oct., 1770, the sponsors at his bap- 

tism being Balthazer Pickel, and wife, d. 20 Nov.. 18:35, unm. ; at the age 
of thirteen he went to New York cairying his worldly eflfects upon 
his back. Securing a situation in a mercantile house his industry 



Children of Christiax or Christopher Melick. 697 

and capabilities ensured rapid advancement until at the early age 
of twenty-one he was admitted to a partnership. For many years he 
was a prosperous merchant being the founder of the great commer- 
cial house of Melicli & Burger, whish did a heavy West India busi- 
ness at 76 Washington St. The firm owned vessels plying between 
New Yorls: and Santa Cruz, among them the ship "Chase," a famous 
craft of that day, whose captain was David Rogers, afterwards prom- 
inent in the sugar trade. Baltus Melicli, as he was called, was the 
secretary of a social club called "The Friary," of which Dr. Charles 
Buxton was the Chancellor and which met every first and third Sun- 
day in the mouth at 56 Pine St. He was the first president of the 
Chemical Bank, holding the position for seven years until his death; 
his will divided a considerable estate between his brothers, sisters, 
nephews, nieces, and appointed as executors his sister "Susan," his 
brother "Jonas and his nephew Balthazer;" he is buried at Lebanon, 
N. J. 

8. III. SOPHIA, of New Germantown, b. 17 Oct., 1774, the sponsors at her baptism 

being Godfrey Reinhart and wife, d. 28 June, 1849, m. 8 Mch., 1807, Wil- 
liam Lambert, b. 1 Mch., 1782, d. 31 Aug., 1854; had 3 ch. 
I. Susan A., b. 22 Mch., I808, d. 28 Mch., 1887, m. 20 June, 1832, Adam Reger, 
of White House, N. J., b. 7 Aug., 1826, d. 1 Sep., 1868; their ch., Sa7-aJi 
Sophia, b. 30 Oct., 1833 d. 13 Mch., 1856, ra. 1 Jan., 1855, Peter H. Dia- 
mond, of N. Y., and had one ch., who d. in infancy; Elizabeth M., b. 
15 Mch.. 1840, d. 25 Oct., 1863; Garettd L., b. 4 Nov.. 1842, d. 27 July, 
1867, m. 20 Feb., 1866, David N. Foster, of N. Y.; left one ch., Fred- 
erick, who is married and lives at Terre Haute, Ind. 
II. Jeremiah, of N. Y., b. 12 Jan., 1812, d., 30 Oct., 1866, m. 11 Mch., 1840, 
Garetta V. D., dan. of Simon Vliet, of Bedminster, N. J.; their ch., 
William, res. N. Y., who m. 23 May, 1880, Fanny, dau. of R. S. Tall- 
madge, of N. Y. ; Jolui Jamen, res. N. Y., who m. 24 Feb., 1874, Josle 
Oakford, and has 2 ch. ; Anna Elizabeth, res. N. Y. 
III. Elizabeth Chichester, of New Germantown, b. 12 Oct., 1816, d. 21 
Apl., 1847, m. 1 Mar., 1838, John P. S. Miller, of New Germantown, 
and left no ch. 

9. IV. JONAS, of Round Valley, N. J., b. 10 Feb., 1777, the sponsors at his baptism 

being Jonas Melick and wife, d. 31 Dec, 1859, m. in 1803 Cathei'ine, dau. 
of Matthew Adams, b. 12 July, 1783, d. 3 Sep., 1850; for his 11 ch. see 
p. 698. 

10. V. ELIZABETH, of N. Y., b. 18 Aug., 1783, the sponsors at her baptism being 

Daniel Schaef er and wife, d. 23 Nov., 1866, m. first, Gilbert Chichester, 
a merchant of N. Y., who d. 7 Sep., 1852, aged 66, by whom no ch. ; m. 
second, 16 June, 1859, David Neighbour, res. German Valley, N. J., b. 
25 Nov., 1797, and still living; she is buried at Lebanon. 

11. VI. SUSAN, of N. Y., b. 26 Dec, 1785, the sponsors at her baptism being her 

parents; d. 24 Aug., 1871; m. in 1838, Simon Vliet, of Bedminster, N. J., 
b. in 1783, d. 8 Apl., 186S; no ch. 

THIRD GENERATION (D.) 

Peter Melick (3) had 6 ch. 

12. I. DAVID, b. in 1790, d. 19 Oct., 1827, m. Mary, dau. of Hon. Ephraim Harriott, 

of Woodbridge, N. J. ; had one son who d. at age of 20. 

13. II. PETER B., b. 8 Aug., 170.S, d. 8 May, 1872, m. 5 Feb., 1823, Mary Moore, dau. of 

William Harriott, of Woodbridge. N. J. For his 4 ch. see p. 699. 

14. III. JOEL, res. Rahway, N. J., b. 26 May, 1803, unra. 

15. IV, PARMELIA, m. a Dixon of N. Y. City, address of her son, Geo. W. Dixon, 

333 Washington St., N. Y. C. 

16. V. HARRIET, b. 2 Oct., 1800, d. 12 Jan., 1875, m. 1821, Nicholas La Forge, b. 20 

Dec, 1798, d. 19 July. 1881; had 5 ch., all d. in early youth excepting one 
dau., Frances A., b. Sep. 2, 18.36, res. Rahway, N. J. 

17. VI. MARY, b. 22 Oct., 1806, d. 15 Aug., 1867, m. 28 Dec, 1842, James Kaseby, b. 11 

July, 1814, d. 22 Nov., 1870; had 2 ch., I. Frances Adelia, b. 25 Jan., 
1845, d. infancy; II. Mary Anna, b. 7 Oct., 1849, m. in 1870 William 
Ellis who d. In 1882, has 5 ch. 



€98 Children of Leonard and David Melick. 

third generation (d). 

Leonard Melick (4) had 7 ch. 

18. I. FANNY, b. In 1787, d. in Apl., 1853. 

19. II. NANCY, b. in 1789, d. 25 Dec, 1858, m. William Adams; res. of her dau. 

Althea Hart, Metuchen, N. J. 

20. III. JOHN, b. In 1791, d. 8 Aug., 1856, m. Mary F. Clarkson, b. in 1800, d. 25 May, 

1851. For 6 ch. see p. 700. 

21. IV. HANNAH, b. in 1794. d. in 1859, m. Joseph Bower, of N. Y. City; had 2 ch., 

I. Margaret Ann, unm. 
II. Elizabeth, m. Jerry Yearance. 

22. V. DAVID B., of Rahway, N. J., b. in Hunterdon Co., in 1797, d. 13 Aug., 1867, 

m. 1829, Mary E., dau. of John Campbell, of Metuchen, N. J., b. in 1799, 
d. 31 Oct., 18.39; had4ch., 
I. Mary Elizabeth, b. l Oct., 1831, unm. 
II. John L., b. l Feb., 18.33, unm. 

III. Henry C, b. 18 Jan., 1835, unm. 

IV. Cecelia Ann, b. 30 July, 1837, d. in Aug-., 18.39. Mary, John, and Henry 

occupy a homestead farm adjoining the city of Plainfleld, N. J. 

23. VI. ISAAC B., of Plainfleld, N. J., b. 31 Aug., 1801, d. 22 Nov., 1871, m. Sarah M. 

Thorp, b. 14 Feb., 1811, d. 20 Jan., 1887. For his 14 ch. see p. 7oi. 
ai. VII. ALTHEA, b. in l8o3, d. in 1850. m. Randolph Morris; res. of her son Ran- 
dolph Morris, South Plainfleld, N. J. 

FOURTH GENERATION (D.) 

David Melick (6) had 6 ch. 

25. I. JOHN S., of New Germantown. b. 3 Nov., 1795, d. in 1865, m. Eva Elizabeth, 

dau. of Jacob Apgar, of Cokesburg, N. J., b. in 1790, d. 3 Apl., 1857. For 
his 4 ch. see p 701. 

26. II. CHRISTOPHER, of Larabertville, N. J., b. 3 Aug., 1797, d. in Feb., 1854, m. in 

1827, Elizabeth, dau. of Gershom Lambert, of Lambertville, who d. in 
Jan., 1808. For his 5 ch. see p 701. 

27. III. BALTHAZER, of Somerville, N. J., b. 27 Aug., 1799, d. 9 Dec,. 1868, was for 

many years a merchant in N. Y., m..Jlrst, Mary Ann, dau. of Asa Hall, 
of N. Y., d. about 1834, by whom 2 ch. ; m. second, Charlotte S., dau. of 
Asa Hall, of N. Y., b. 20 Jan., 1809, d. 14 Sep., 1875, by whom 5 ch. For 
hi8 7 ch. see p. 702. 

28. IV. WILLIAM GRAFF, of New Germantown, b. 9 Feb., 1801, d. in 1857, m. 

Rebecca Hunter, of New Germantown, who d. in Feb., 1861, by whom 
one ch., Sophia, b. in 1832, d. 20 Mch., 1859, who m. Benjamin Apgar, of 
Callfon, N. J., and had 2 dau., both of whom died without ch. 

29. V. PETER KLINE, of New Germantown, N. J., b. 19 Sep., 1806, d. 25 Jan., 1879, 

m. 23 Oct.. 1830, Eliza, dau. of Joachim Gulick, of New Germantown, b. 
6 Mch„ 1808, d. 3 May, 1881. had ch. 
I. Joseph B., b. 10 Aug., 1831, d. 28 Oct., 1849. 

II. Benjamin V. D., b. 8 June, 18*4, d. 5 Sep., 1873, m. Ella, dau. of Free- 
man Smith, of N. Y., and had no ch. 

III. Anna G., res. Newark, N. J. 

IV. Elizabeth C, who d. 17 Jan,, 1845, aged 3. 

V. Elizabeth, m. Martin Richardson, res. Hackettstown, N. J., and has 
2 ch., Ida May and Benjamin M. 
VI. Malvina M., who d. 22 June, I88O. 

VII. Frances, m. Charles Eddowes, res. Newark, N. J. ; had 3 ch., Charles 
F7-edericTc, b. 16 July, 1881, d. 3 July, 1887, Miriam it., b. 6 Sep., 1883, 
and Helen Margaretta, b. 14 Nov., 1888. 

30. VI. CHICHESTER, b. 14 Jan., 1811, followed the sea for many years, when he 

settled in California, marrying a widow with one ch. ; whether he is 
living is unknown. 

FOURTH GENERATION. 

Jonas Melick (9) had 11 ch. 

31. I. CHRISTOPHER, of Round Valley, N. J., b. 2 Dec., 1803, d. 1 Jan., 1874, m. 



Children of Jonas & Peter B. Melick. 699 

Sarah, dau. of Abraham Voorhees, of Reading-ton, N. J., b. 3 Feb., 1807, 
d. 25 Mch., 1873; for his 8 ch. see p. 702. 

32. II. JOHN U., b. 14 Mch., 1805, d. 19 Sep., 1809. 

33. III. HANNAH GRAAF, b. 19 Sept., 1807, d. 31 May. 1808, m. in Dec., 1829, John 

R. Uonover, of Potterstown, N. J., b. 16 Mch., 1803, d. 20 Nov., 1880; had 
4ch. 
I. Garret, res. White House, N. J., b. 29 Nov., 1830, m. 27 Dec, 1856, 
Christiana, dau. of Andrew Emmaus, of Readington, N. J.; their 
ch.. Garret. G., b. 5 Mch., 1863; Annie R., b. 13 Feb., 1865, m. 3 Nov., 
1870., John W. Ramsey, of Potterstown, b. 19 Mch., 1865; Lizzie B.. 
b. 15 Oct., 1867, and Mary E., b. 3 Nov., 1870. 
II. Catherine, b. 19 Oct., 1833, d. 3 July, 1882. 

III. Jonas M., res. Round Valley, N. J., m. Amanda, dau. of Richard De 
Mott, of Stanton, N. J., their ch., Kate R., b. 4 0ct., 1865, m. George 
Reger. of White House, N. J.; Richard D.. res. Apgar's Corner, N. 
J., b. 10 Sept., 1867, m. 16 Nov.. 1887, A^nie B., dau. of William 
Fulper. no ch.; Jenny M.,h. 4 Oct., 1871; Laura B., b. 23 July, 1873; 
John R., b. 12 Apl., 1875; and Cora M., b. 16 Nov., 1879. 
IV. Margaret, b. 20 Sept., 1843. m. 9 Nov., 1867. John R. Haver, of Round 
Valley, N. J., b. 27 Apl., 1838, and has 6 ch.. William E., b. 6 Aug.. 
1869; Georgiana, b. 1 Mar., 1873; Christopher B., b. 16 Dec, 1874; 
James A., b. 8 Oct., 1877; Stella S., b. 15 Mch., 1880, and Ida May, b. 24 
Feb., 1887. 

34. IV. MATTHEW ADAMS, b. 1. Sep., 1809, d. in Infancy. 

35. V. HANNAH M., of Brooklyn, N. Y., b. 23 Feb., 1811, d. 12 Apl., 1884. 

36. VI. ELIZABETH CHICHESTER, b. 7 Mch., 1813, d. 29 Mch., 1877, m. Philip Lee. 

of Newark. N. J., has ch. 
I. Philip, unm.; II. Jonas M.. unra. 
III. John P., Avho is m. and has 1 dau., Josephine. 

37. VII. SUSAN SELL, b. 17 Dec, 1815, d. 24 July, 184.3, m. John C. WyckofC, of Pot- 

terstown, N. J., b. 20 Oct.. 1817. d. 11 Mch., 1845; had 3 ch., 
I. George, res. High Bridge, N. J., b. 31 July, 1839. m. 22 June. 1861, Hes- 
ter A., dau. of Joshua Henderson, of Tewksbury tp., b. 22 Mch.. 
1844; has 4 ch., Wilbur, b. 26 Jan., 1864; Elsie, b. 14 Aug.. 1869; Jenny 
E.. b. 6 Jan.. 1873. and Lewis G., b. 26 Sep.. 18S1. 
II. Susan, a twin, res. 472 Fifth Ave., Brooklyn, L. I., m. William Carlisle; 

has one son. Balthazer. 
III. Cornelia Elizabeth, a twin, res. Gouldsboro Station, Pa., b. 15 July, 
184.5, m. first, 25 Nov., 1864, William Baker, b. 3o Apl., 1834; m. second, 
John Wyckoff ; has 3 ch., John W., b. in Mch., 1866; Jenny, b. 23 Oct., 
1867, and Martha J., b. 28 Jan.. 1871; all m. 

38. VIII. BALTHAZER A., res. Lebanon, N. J., b. 31 Dec, 1817. m. 2o Sep., 1838, 

WlUlampe W., dau. of Lucas Vorhees, of Round Valley. N. J. For 
his 5 ch. see p. 702. 

39. IX. JONAS, of Rosemont, N. J., b. 21 Nov., 1820, d. 19 Apl., 1882. m. 18 Nov.. 

1846, Elsie E.. dau. of Joseph Anderson, b. 30 Apli. 1824; had one son. 
I. Joseph A., res. Rosemont, N. J., b. 23 Apl.. 1848. m. 12 Dec, 1869, Han- 
nah Elizabeth, dau. of Henry Wood; their son, Edward J., b. 30 
June, 1873. 

40. X. CATHERINE A., of Potterstown, N. J., b. 23 Sep., 1822, d. 28 June, 1857, m. 

Nicholas W. Apgar, b. in 1821. d. 23 Nov., 1846; left no ch. 

41. XI. SARAH J., res. Round Valley, N. J., b. 30 Dec. 1824, ra. Jacob T. Wolfe, of 

Peapack, N. J., dec. ; had ch. 
I. Amadee. res. Plainfleld, N. J., m. first, Catherine Somers. of Bedmin s- 
ter, N. J., by whom 3 ch.; Alexander, Emma L., and Florence if ay; 
m. second, Lizzie Tillman, of Plainfleld, N. J., by whom one ch., 
Anna Beulah; II. JTohn, who ra. Martha Peer, of Pottersville, N. J. 

III. Anna Augusta. 

IV. Simon V. 
V. William C. 

FOURTH GENERATION (D). 

Peter B. Melick (13) had 4 ch. 

42. I. JOSEPH MATTISON. res. Toledo, O., b. 12 July, 182-:), ra. 1 May, 1851. Anna 



700 Ch. of John, Dayton L., & Isaac B. Mklick. 

Hartley, dau. of Rev. Wm. Bryant Barton, of Woodbridge, N. J., b. i 
June, I83i2, had S ch. 
I. Annie B., res. Woodbridsre, N. J., b. 21 Mch.. 18.52, m. 23 Dec, 1873, Wil- 
lett Denlke, asst. U. S. Atty. for N. Y.. who d. 7 Dec., 1874; their one 
ch., WiUett, b. 1874. 
11. William Barton, b. 21 June, 1853, dec. 

III. Addie, res. N. Y. C, b. 21 June, 1855, m. 4 Feb.. 1881, Wethered B. 
Thomas, of N. Y.; their 3 ch., Ernnina Wethered. b. 1881, d. in 
infancy; Lewin Hartley, b. 1683; Bryant BUicott, b. 1884, d. 1888. 

43. II. JOEL, res. Woodbridg-e, N. J., b. 5 Sep., 1839, m. 24 Oct., 18(50, Annie E.. dau. 

of Isaac S. Payne, of Woodbridere, N. J., b. 7 Oct., 1841; had 3 ch. 

I. Elmek E., b. 12 Mch., 1802; IT. Claua M., b. 9 Aug-., 18(54; III. Willard 

P.. b. 2 Oct., 1870. 

44. MARY F., b. 18 Nov., 1836, m. 17 Aug-., 1864, Charles O. Holmes; has 4 ch., I. 

Lewla, b. 6 Oct., l8(iG; II. Hauby Grant, b. 22 Oct., 1868; III. Mary 
Harriott, b. 8 8ep., 1874; IV. Fanny Voorhees, b. 22 Dec, 1877. 

45. IV. PETER BKITTON, res. Berwyn, Chester Co., Pa., b. at Woodbridge, N. J. 

26 May, 18.34. m. 3 Oct, 185.3, Mary Elizabeth, dau. of Gearge Hutchin^s, 
of Newark, N. J. ; has 3 ch., 
I. Elizabeeh Coriell, b. 27 Sep., 1854, m. H) Feb., 1874, GrifBth Williams 
Thomas, of Phila.; their 3ch., Mfi7-y Meiiclc, h. 28 Nov., 1k74: Peter 
Britton, b. 12 Nov., 1877; Griffith Harrington, b. 1 Apl., 1877. 

II. Fanny Harriet, b. 13 Nov. 1856, m. 13 Nov., 1876, George A. Lein-au, of 

Phila. ; their 5 ch., Geor'je Britton, b. 8 June, 1877; Fanny Williston, 
b. 8 July, 1878; italin, b. 27 May, 1880; Andj-eio. b. 13 Sep., 1882; Xor- 
uiau., b. 3 Jan., 1886. 
III. Edward L., b. '27 Nov., 1858, d. 14 May, 1863. 

FOURTH GENERATION (D). 

John Melick (20) had 6 ch. 

46. I. ISAAC C, b. 26 Nov., 1817, d. 29 Apl., 1888, m. 12 Dec, 1855, Sarah E., dau. of 

Henry Moore; had 2 ch. 
I. Maky S., b. 3 July, 1856, m. George W. Hawes, and has 2 ch. 
II. William Seward, res. Port Richmond. S. I., b. 21 May, 1860, widower, 
no ch. 
s7. II. DAYTON L., res. Plainfield, N. J., b. 28 May, 1819, Is a farmer owning- 170 
acres of laud just beyond the city limits, m. 13 Dec, 1843, Sarah Lever, 
of Plainfield, N. J., b. 6 Sep., 1821; had 5 ch., 
T. William L., b. 20 May, 1847, m. Lillie, dau. of Marselis Parks, of New 

Brooklyn, (South Plaiulield,) N. J., and has one ch., Dayton. 
II. Walter S., b. 27 May, 1852, m. Harriet, dau. of Meeker Hetfleld, of 
Dunellen, N. J., and has one ch., Frederick. 

III. Sarah S., b. in Jan., 1855, dec. 

IV. John, b. 14 Oct., 1858, ra. Nellie, dau. of William Phillips, of Brooklyn, 

N. y., and has one ch., Lester. 
V. Leonard, b. 6 Oct., 1863, m. Josephine, dau. of Frank Baker, of West- 
fleld, N. J.; no ch. 

48. III. MELANCTHON, res. Menlo Park, N. J., m.flrst. Sarah A. Randolph; had 

one ch., 
I. Anna, m. James Liddel, res. Woodbridfre, N. J., m. secoiid, Caroline 
Flomerfelt, of German Valley, N. J., by whom 2 ch., Jolin and 
George. 

49. IV. ELIZABETH, d. In 1841, m. John Haviland, of Rahway, N. J.; no ch. 

50. V. SUSAN F., m. Joseph Brewster, of Woodbridije, N. J., both dec; had one 

ch., 
I. Henriett.4, m. Daniel Berry, res. Plainfield, N. J. 

51. VI. JOHN J., res. Franklin, Pa., widower; has 4 ch., 2 sons and 2 dau's. 

FOURTH GENERATION (D.) 
Isaac B., Melick (23) had 14 ch. 

5?. I. Harriet l.. b. in 18-29. 

58. II. JAMES T.. res. Hahway, N. J., b. in 1831, m. in i860, Rachel B. Clarkson, has 
3 ch.. Sarah C. , Joel C. and Ch.\rles R. 



Ch. of John S., Christopher & Balthazer Melick. 701 

54. III. LEONARD, b. in 18:«, d. in Nov., 1854, in Columbus, Ga. 

55. IV. MARY A., b. in 1835, d. in March, 1885. 

56. V. HULDAH R., b, in 1837, d. 8 Nov., 1871. 

57. VI. SARiiH E., b. in 1839, ra. William Van Nest. 

58. VII. SUSAN F„ res. Fanwood, N. J., b. iu 1841, m. Thomas J. Lee. 

59. VIII. WILLIAM R., res, Rahway, N. J., b. in 1843, m. Nelly Clawson, and has 

one oh., NELfA'. 

60. IX. ISAAC F. b. in 1845, d. in 1880, m. Georgia Parlies; had 2 ch., I. Letta; 

II. John J. 

61. X. VIRGINIA, b. in 1847, d. in 1870. 

62. XI. GEORGETTE, b. in 1850, d. in 1873. 

63. XII. ALICE, res. Newark, N. J., b. in 1852, unm. 

64. XIII. AUGUSTA, res. Rahway, N. J., b. in 1854, m. Lester Laforge. 

65. XIV. DORA, res. Newark, N. J„ b. in 1856, m. Willliam Marsell. 

FIFTH GENERATION (D.) 
John S. Melick (25) had 4 ch. 

66. I. BALTIS P., res. Elizabeth, N. J., who ra. Nancy McCord, of New German- 

town. His 5 ch. 
I. J. Lambert, res. Elizabeth, N. J. 

II. Jacob Runkle, res. Hunter's Point, L. I., who m. twice and has 2 
dau's. by first wife, and 2 sons, John and FreAerick Baltis, by 
second wife. 

III. Sarah, m. Joseph Smith, res. Elizabeth, N. J.; has 4 cb. 

IV. Margaret, res. Elizabeth, N. J. 

V. John, res. Elizabeth, N. J., m. Georgie Ketcham, and has 2 ch., John 
Raijmond and a dau. 

67. II. WILLIAM A., of New Hampton Junction, N. J., b. 6 June, 1823, d. 18 

Apl., 1889, m. 19 June, 1845, Charity C, dau. of John Apgar, of Cokes- 
burg, N. J„ b. Sep., 1827. For his 9 ch. see p. 703. 

68. III. MARGARET A., m. flrst, J. Foley, of New Germantown, N. J., and has 

one son. 
I. Baltis P. Melick, res. L.vnden, Kansas, who m. Alice dau. of Samuel 
Schureman, of 111., and has one son Bradford W.; m. second, John 
Dilley, of New Germantown, N. J. 

69. IV. JACOB A., of New Germantown, N. J., d. 28 Mch., 1876, m. in 1858, Margaret 

Tharp, of New Germantown, N. J., had ch. ; I. Anna Elizabeth, res. 
Dover, N. J. ; II. Charles E., res. New Germantown, N. J. ; III. Emma 
Augusta, m. in 1888, Seldon Wildricks, res. Dover, N. J. ; IV. Lottie 
B., ra. Frank W. Lindsley, res. Drea Hook, N. J., has 2 ch.; V. Laura 
Virginia, I'es. New Germantown, N. J. 

FIFTH GENERATION [D.) 
Christopher Melick (26) had 5 ch. 

70. I. GERSHOM LAMBERT, res. Lambertville, N. J., b. 14 Xpl., 1828, m. 1 Jan., 

1852, Cornelia B., dau. of Hiram Price, of Hunterdon, b. 25 Mch., 1831; 
has 2 ch., 
I. Walter C, b. 12 June, 1859. 

II. Christopher P., res. Milford, Ct., b. 10 Oct., 18G5, m. in June, 1888, Ida 
Bigley, of Riegelsville, Pa. 

71. II. MALVINA, 

72. IIL HANNAH A., 

73. IV. DAVID, res. Huntington, L. I., ra. Maria L. Ketcham, of Brooklyn, N. Y.; 

has ch., I. Raymond D. and II. Clarence. 

74. V. AUGUSTA. 

FIFTH GENERATION (D.) 
Balthazer Melick (27) had 2 ch. by jir.<t wite. 

75. I. MARGARET ELIZABETH, m. Abraham V. Melick («3), res. Round Valley, 

N. J.; has one ch., I. Charlotte, m. Theodore Hendershot, of Round 
Valley, and has no ch. 

76. IL SARAH ANN. 



702 Ch. of Chijist., Baltus P., & Balthazer A. Melick. 

Balthazer Melick (27) had 5 ch. by second wife. 

77. III. MARY N., in. William J. Shotwell, res. Woo(Jbrids?e, N. J.; had ch., I. Wii> 

MAM, II. Hattie, III. ROBEKT, dec, and one other. 

78. IV. SUSAN v., res. Somerville, m., Jlrst John J. Jones, of N. Y., by whom no 

ch.; secotul, Peter Van Nest, of Somerville, N. J., b. 17 July, 1841, d. 15 
Oct., 1881, by whom one ch. I. Lily May. 

79. V. DAVID, d. aged 4. 

80. VI. GARETTA L., res. Brooklyn, N. Y., m. Robert- S. Wardell, of N. Y., and 

has 2 ch. 

81. VII. GILBERT C, res. Somerville, N. J., m. Emma, dau. of Leonard Bunn, of 

Somerville; had ch., I. John J., b. in 1870, d. in 1888; II. Leonard B., 
III. Annie, IV. Alvah, V. Grace. 

FIFTH GENERATION (D). 

Christopher Melick (31) had 8 ch, 

82. I. JONAS C, res. Peapack, N. J., b. 3 Feb., 1828, ra. 7 Jan., 1863, Sarah M. Lane; 

of Readington, N. J., b. 14 Aug-., 18-35; has 2 ch. 

I. Simon V., b. 23 Oct., 1863; II. Theodore H., b. 18 Nov., 1866. 

83. II. ABRAHAM VOORHEES, res. Round Valley, N. J., m. Margaret E., dau. of 

Balthazer Melick (27) had 2 ch. 
I. Mary Ann, b. 28 Maj', 1855, d. l May, 1864. 

II. Charlotte, who m. Theodore Hendershot, of Round Valley, N. J., 

and has no ch. 

84. III. JOHN v., res. Round Valley, N. J., m. Eleanor Smith; had ch., I. Sarah, 

m. John Craft, of Round Valley, and has 4 ch.; II. William Gilbert, 
b. 12 Oct., 1858, d. 22 Apl., 1864; III. Jacob. 

85. IV. JANE, m. William Thompson, res. Raritan, N. J.; has 5 ch., I. Annie; 

II. Christopher; III. Hannah; IV. Henry; V. John. 

86. V. BALTUS P., res. Fairview, Fulton Co., 111., b. 1 May 18.36, m. 21 Nov., 1856, 

Phebe Thompson, of Readington, N. J., b. 22 Dec, 1838; had 4 ch.; 
1. Henrietta V., b. 21 June, 1858, m. 26 June, 1875, Sauford Westervelt, 
b. 22 Jan., 1850; their 2 ch., Baltus M., b. 30 July, 1880, and Mandela, 
b. 2G May, 1883. 
II. Jeremiah, V. T., b. 31 Dec, 1861, m. 23 Aug., 1885, Irene Parks, b. 25 
Apl., 1866; their 1 ch., Christop7t«r, b. 18 Aug., 1886. 

III. Elizabeth N., b. 21 July, 1864, ra. 21 Aug., 1885, Walter Parks, b. 10 

Aug., 1858. 

IV. John S., b. 18 July, 1873, 

87. VI. SUSAN v., m. Daniel Sheets, dec, res. Stanton, N. J; no ch. 

88. VII. HANNAH W., m. Theodore Hubbard, res. Lebanon, N. J.; no ch. 

89. VIII. WILLIAM, res. Round Valley, N. J., m. Sarah dau. of William Reger, of 

White House, N. J. ; had ch., I. Abraham Voorhees; II. Susan A. ; III. 
William R. ; IV. Charlotte. 

FIFTH GENERATION (D.) 



Balthazer A. Melick (38) had 5 ch. 

^V. A Y, 97 Alio- 18M d -'s Mph.. 1845. 



90. I. CATHERINE A., b. 27 Aug., 1839, d. 28 Mch., 1845. 

91. II. SIMON v., b. 10 Oct., 1842, d. 4 June, 1803, at Acquia Creek, Virginia, a soldier 

of Co. A., 31st Regt., N. J. V. 

92. III. LUCAS v., of Lebanon, N. J., b. 30 Oct., 1844, d. 18 June, 1881, m. 17 Dec, 1867, 

Hettie Lucretia, dau. of Nathan Hoffman, of Lebanon; had ch., I. Wil- 
liampe v., and II. John C. 

93. IV. GILBERT C, res. Lebanon, N. J., b. 4 June, 1&48, m. first, 3 Feb., 1874. Jennie, 

dau. of Martin Wyckoff, of White House, N. J., b. 21 July, 1852, d. 5 
July, 1881; m. seco)i,d, 21 Nov., 1883, Annie, dau. of William Fleming, of 
Lebanon, N. J.; no ch. 

94. V. SUSAN M.. b. 1 Aug., 1854, m. 20 Oct., 1874, John D. Bonnel, res. White 

House, N. J.; hasch., I. Gilbert C, and II. Marion. 



Ch. of William A. Melick, of New Hampton, N. J. 703 

SIXTH GENERATION (D.) 

William A. Melick, {67) had 9 ch. 

95. I. MARY E., res. Elraira, N. Y., b. 7 Mch., 1847, m. 14 Sep., 1H64, Oliver Elmeu- 

doi'f, of Rahway, N. J., b. 2G Mch., 1841; be served throughout the Civil 
War In a N. Y. re^.; has 2 ch., I. William M., b. 17 Oct., 1865; II. Ber- 
tha, b. 23 June, 1870. 

96. II. JAMES S., res. Dover, N. J., b. 18 Nov., 1851, iji. Susan Vanatta, of Glen 

Gardner, N. J. ; has been clerk of Randolph tp. 4 years, assessor for 4 
years, and was appointed postmaster of Dover by Pres. Cleveland, 22 
June, 1888; has 2 ch., I. Nettie and II. James. 

97. III. GARETTA, res. 988 Atlantic Av., Brooklyn, m. Sam'l P. Hodgkiss; he 

served in Civil War in a Mass. Reg't.; has 2ch., I. Samuel; II. Henry. 

98. IV. JOHN W., res. Asbury Park, N. J., b. 3 Nov., 1855, m. 20 Feb., 1877, Jessie 

Lowe, b. 28 July, 1856; no ch. 

99. V. GEORGIANNA, res. Dover, N. J., b. 18 Dec., 1858, m. 28 July, 1878, John P. 

Egen, b. 26 Dec, 1854; has 5 ch., I. Nellie, b. 10 Sept., 1879; II. George, 
b. 24 Dec, 1880; III. David, b. 27 Aug., 1882; IV. Jenny, b. 28 Feb., 1884; 
V. John P., b. 10 Nov., 1888. 

100. VI. EMMA LEONORA, res. Dover, b. 9 June, 1861, m. 12 Nov., 1878, Joseph H. 

Buchanan, b. 8 Sept., 1849; has 4 ch., I. William, b. 1 July, 1879; II. 
Frederick, b. 3 Feb., 188I; III. Emory V., b. 23 Mch., 1883; IV. Joseph 
R., b. 4 Sept., 1885. 

101. VII. NELLY A., res. Dover, b. 21 Sept., 18C4, m. 30 Aug., 1882, Fred'k. H. Dick- 

erson, b. 8 Apl., 1860; no ch. 

102. VIII. KITTIE G., b. 18 Dec, 1865. 

103. IX. FRANK Z., b. 22 July, 1868. 



JOHAN PETER MOELICH (E). 

Peter Melick, of Columbia Co., Pennsylvania, and his descendants. 

1. I. JOHAN PETER MOELICH (E), was the son of Hans Peter (VIIL), of Ben- 
dorf on the Rhine, Germany, and the grandson of Jonas (V), who 
migrated to that place from Winningen on the Moselle in 1688. He 
was a brother of David (D) and Johan Jonas (XV.) both of whom 
emigrated to America (see pp. 79,696). Peter Melick, as he was known 
in later life, was born 12 Oct., 1715 in Bendorf; with that his record 
ends in Germany. The date of his immigration is unknown, but it 
is probable that he came with his brothers to America. As neither 
his nor their names appear among those of the Palatine arrivals in 
Pennsylvania, they must have landed at New York. Unfortunately 
that colony did not require arriving immigrants to register their 
names with the provincial secretary. Peter is said to have remained 
with his brothers for some time in New Jersey, and then migrated to 
Pennsylvania, taking up land in the vicinity of where is now the vil- 
lage of Espy, in Columbia County. Here he cleared the ground of its 
primitive forests and engaged in farming, and here many of his 
descendants are still living. 

SECOND GENERATION (E.) 

Peter Melick (i) had 7 ch. 

2. I. JOHN, first settled In Northumberland Co., Pa., removing from there in 

1800 to the vicinity of Northeast, Erie Co., Pa.; m. Catherine SchoUer. 
He and his descendants spell their name Malich: For his 8 ch. see p. 704. 

3. II. PETER, b. IS Apl., 1752, d. 11 Feb., 1830, m. Rachel, dau. of John M. Cllngman 

and granddau. of Jacob Klingemann, a German emigrant, b. 8 Apl., 
1759. d. 2 Sep., 1841. Peter lived on his father's land near Espy, in Col- 



704 Ch. of Petek IVIelick of Columbia Co., Pa. 

umbia Co., Pa., until 1778 when his house was destroyed by the Indians 
in return for his activity in repelling' predatory invasions of the sav- 
ages. He and his family escaped to Fort Wheeler near bj, then com- 
manded by the celebrated Moses Van Campen. He then built a house 
on land he had bought in 1774 from John and Thomas Penn, proprie- 
tors of the Province of Penna, located midway between Light-Street 
and Bloorasburg In the same county. Here he lived until his death 
the property still being in the possession of his descendants. During 
the Revolution he served in the Continental army and spent the 
winter of 1777-8 with the army at Valley Forge. He is said to have 
gained the thanks of General Washington at this time because of 
making a tour through the state and securing for the army a large 
supply of grain which was ground in the old mill (still standing) at 
Valley Forge. Throughout his life he was an active member of the 
Methodist Church. For ch. see p. 704. 

4. III. DAVID, m. a Conrad; settled first at the mouth of Fishing creek in North- 

umb., now Col., Co.; in 1772 removed to Augusta, now Rockafeller tp. 
near Sunbury, taking up six hundred acres of land, building a stone 
house in which he lived until his death in 1836. He had several daugh- 
ters and at least six sons, viz. : John, George, Jacob, David, Peter, 
and Henry. Peter the 5th son b. 1790, d. 9 Aug., 1863, m. Mary Reeser, 
b. 1796, d. 14 Nov., 1872; their — ch., I. William, dec., m. a Heilman and 
had a ch.; II. Simon P., res. Sunbury; III. Hiram, dec; IV. David R., 
res. Sunbury; V. Harriet, res. Sunbury, m. Sam. Keefer; VI. Maria, 
res. Sunbur.v, m. Sara. Woolf; VII. John R.; VIII. Peter, dec; IX. 
Samuel, dec. ; X. Jeremiah; probably other ch. (No certainty is felt 
as to the correctness of this record). 

5. IV. HENRY, m. Julia Alstot; for ch. see p 707. 

6. V. MICHAEL, b. in Col. Co., Pa., in 175G, d. in Phila. in 1818, ra. about 1780 Cathe- 

rine Christian, b. in N. J. in 1758, d. in Phila., 12 Nov., 1824; he served in 
war of 1812; for ch. see p. 708. 

7. VI. CHARITY, m. a Mr. Folselle; descendants living in Canada. 
S. VII. MARGARET, m. Metsinger; descendants living In Ohio. 

THIRD GENERATION (E.) 
John Malick (2) had 8 ch. 

9. I. GEORGE lived and died in Ohio, ra. and had several ch. 

10. II. HENRY, b. 15 Mch., 1797, d. 26 Oct., I87.i, ra. 23 Aug., 1825, Elizabeth, dau. of 

Peter Musselman, of Canada, b. 5 June, 1800, d. 9 Oct., 1871. Lived for 
the raost of his life at West Mill Creek, Erie Co., Pa., but d. at the res. 
of his son Henry P., (45) Girard, Pa. ; for 5 ch. see p. 709. 

11. in. DAVID, lived and died in Indiana. 

12. IV. ANDREW, his son David now living at North East, Pa. 
1.3. V. PETER. 

14. VI. JACOB. 
1.5. vn. JOHN. 

16. VIII. SAMUEL, res. Unionville, Ashtabula Co., O., b. In Pa. 9 June, 1809, m. 

29 Oct., 1S29, Polly Lull, b. in Oct., 1806, d. 2 Jan., 1887; moved to Ohio 
in 1865; no ch. 

THIRD GENERATION (Ej. 

Peter Melick (3) had 11 ch. 

17. I. JOHN, d. when 5 years old. 

18. II. DAVID, d. near Geneva, New York, leaving at least 3 ch.; a married dau., 

res. Reading, Pa.; another dau., res. Philadelphia, and an only son, 
Peter, who served in war of Rebellion, and since then has been miss- 
ing. 

19. III. JACOB, b. 19 Apl., 1799, d. 19 Aug.. 1886, m. 10 May, 1827, Elizabeth, dau. of 

Peter Willet, of near Light -Street, Penna., b. 27 Aug., 1807, on the farm 
of her father, almost within sight of where she died, 3 Mch., 1888. 
Throughout Jacob Melicks life he was distinguished *for his business 
activity, for zeal in doing good, and as being a leading and valued 



Ch. of Peter Melick and Baltis Appleman. 705 

member of the Methodist church of his viciijity. Up to the time of 
his death for 21 years religious meetings of members of that com- 
muniou were held in one of his houses on each Tuesday afternoon. 
He travelled extensively in Europe and America, and engaged in 
many impoi'tant business enterprises, including that of tanning, 
store-keeping, mining iron ore, and operating a blast furnace. He 
made his home in Liglit-Street for 59 years, living on the homestead 
where he died since 1827. So large was the attendance of neighbors 
and friends at his f unei'al that the sermon was preached in a grove 
near his residence. Mrs. Melicli, familiarly known as Aunt Betsy, 
was greatly beloved for her piety and good works. Possessed of a 
rarely beautiful nature in which strength and gentleness equally 
blended, her daily walk and convei'sation were considered a model in 
all that was best of womanhood. For 13 ch. see p. 709. 
20. IV. PETER, b. 27 Feb. 1794, d. in Aug., 1867, m. in 1817, Margaret, dau. of Jacob 
Best, h. 27 June, 1801, d, in 1882. He was a farmer at Light-Street in 
Columbia Co., Pa., and a member, an officer and a class leader of the 
Methodist church, For 13 ch. see p. 710. 
21.5 V. JOHN, d. when 4 years old. 

22 VI. NANCY, b. 15 Oct., 1778, m. William Richart, a farmer of Columbia Co., Pa., 
had 7 ch. 
I. Robert, b. 10 Dec, 1806, d. 21 Mch., 1879, m. 31 July, 1830, Elizabeth, 
dau. of Daniel Kase, b. l May, 1809, had one son Willinm C, whose 
res. is Rupert, Col. Co., Pa., his 7 ch. Elizabeth, b. 3 Dec, 1863, Mary 
F., b. 28 Feb., 1865, Charles H., b. 22 Nov., 18G6, Infant dau., twin to 
Chas., d. at birth; Wilson G., b. 19 Oct., 1868, d. 21 Nov., 1879; Annie 
R., b. 12 June, 187u, and Hattie J., b. 7 Oct., 1872. 
II. Rachel, b. 8 Mch., 1809. 

III. Peter, b. 17 Feb,, 1811. 

IV. Catherine. 

V. John Smith, b. l May, 1819, d. in infancy. 
23. VII. MARY, b. 10 Feb., 1781, d. 29 May, 1842, m. 12 May, 1801 Baltis Appleman, b. 
10 Apl., 1778, d. 9 June, 1854, a farmer of Hemlock tp.. Col. Co., Pa., 
had 8 ch. 
I. Rachel, b. 12 Feb., 1802, d. 16 May, 1837, m. 2 Nov., 1824, James Childs, b. 
16 June, 1793, d. 10 Jan., 1871, a farmer of Valley tp.. Col, Co., Pa., 
and had 6 ch., James H., res. Hudson, St. Croix Co., Wis,, b. 7 Oct., 
1825; John P., b. 20 May, 1827, d. in 1850; Baltis A., b. 21 Nov., 1829; 
Corclelin, b. 9 Dec, 1831, m. in 1871 to Mr. Smith, and lives at Kal- 
amazoo, Mich., (Box 224); Oscar, b. 7 Jan., 1834, and Aitiia M., b. 20 
June, 1835. 
II. Elizabeth, b. 20 Mch., 1804, m. 1 Nov., 1822, David Harris, b. 29 May, 
1798, d. 19 Mch., 1877, and had 11 ch., Mary Ann, b. 14 Jan., 1825, d. in 
May, 1880, ra. Abram Cramer, res. Hudson, Linawee Co., Mich.; 
John, b. 29 July, 1826, dec. leaving a wife, Mary, who lives at Wake- 
man, Huron Co., Ohio; Liiclnda, b. 9 Apl., 1828, m. Jesse Bhoades, 
and lives at Mt. Pleasant, Isabella Co., Mich. ; Calel), b. Sep., 1831, 
m. Ollie Ostrander, res. Jackson, Jackson Co., Mich. ; J^. \yas7ungton, 
whereabouts unknown, m. Melissa Rhenbottom, who lives at 
Union City, Branch Co., Wic\x.\ Harriet, b. 2 Dec, 1832, m. and d.,12 
Aug., 1868; JoO W., b. 1 Feb., 19,M; Etizubeth, b. 7 Nov., 1838, d. in 
1840; Sarah E., b. 23 May, 1842, d. in 1877, m. Frank Henderson, who 
lives in Lansing, Mich.; Hannah, b. .30 Oct., 1843, m. George W. 
Waight, i-es. Col well, Isabella Co., Mich.; ^?(ce. b. 15 Sep., 1846, m. 
Alfred Phillips, res. Oscoda, Josco Co., Mich. 
III. Peter, b. 2 Sep., 1805, m. j«r.s«, in 1824, Hannah Rishel, and had 6 ch.; 
she d. 7 Aug., 1837, he m. second in Feb., 1840, Catherine Evans, and 
had one ch. 
IV. Matthias, b. 13 Jan., 1807, d. 16 Apl., 1837, m. in 1828, Sarah, dau. of 
Daniel Boat, d. in Oct., 18.58; their ch., Lewis, b. in 1831, d. in 18(;i, m. 
In 18.59, Mary E. Rishel; Ph(£be Jane, b. in 1834, m. in 1851, Baltis 
White, res. Light-Street, Col. Co., Pa. ; Mary EUzabetli, b. in 1836 
dec, m. in 1859, George White. 
V. Baltis, b. 22 June, 1809, d. 16 Dec, 1859, m. in 1841, Margaret Aikmau, 

45 



706 Ch. of p. Melick, H. Traugh, J. C. Blck .^ J. Williams. 

dec; their ch., Clara A., b. 10 Feb., 1845, m. In 18G6, Arthur Brandon, 
and has 2 dau's., Mary and Anna, res. Danville, Pa.; Emma.Ta. 
Wilson, res. Bloomsburg, Pa.; and two other dau's. 

VI. Caleb, b. 22 Apl., 1812, d. 20 Apl., 18h8, in. in 1830, Mary Magdalene 

Kishel, b. 15 June, 1810; their ch.. Eliaira, b. 26 Aug., 1832, d. 1 Nov., 
1866, m. first, in 1850, John Carr. second, in 1858, George Carr; Sally 
Ann. b. IC July, 1835, in. in 1858, Cliarles A. Rentz, res. Muncy Station, 
Lycoming Co., Pa.; Agues, b. 21 Jan., 1837, m. in 1870, James Vauder- 
venter, res. Danville, Pa.; Mnry E., b. 11 Dec, 1838, m. in 1866, John 
C. Patterson, and has 2 ch., res. Danville, Pa. ; Maroaret J., b. IG Jan., 
1841, m. in 1871, Jesse C. Amerman, res. Danville, Pa.; Amos B., b. 19 
Nov., 1842, res. Danville, Pa ; Harriet, b. 15 Nov.. 1844. m. in 1868, 
Peter E. Rentz, res. Muncy Station, V&.;EU, b. 7 Feb., 1847, in. in 1871, 
Theresa Dildine, res. Danville, Pa.; Caroline, b. 2 Sept., 1849, m. in 
1871, George Gilmore, res. Linden, Pa. ; Franklin P., b. 11 Sept., 1852, 
ra.in 1877. Mary J. Hendricks, res. Danville, Pa. 

VII. Abby M., b. 7 Aug., 1815, d. 13 Aug., 1847, m. 26 Jan., 1837, George W. 

Drisbauch, a miller, and had one son, Elisha B., res. Montgomery 
Station, Lycoming Co., Pa., and3(ia«'s. 
VIII. Sally Ann, b. 2G Mch.. 1817. m. 31 Jan., 1850, Arthur Buss, res. McEw- 
insville, Ohio; no ch. 

24. Vni. ELIZABETH, in. William Robbins, res. Huntington, Pa.; no ch. 

25. IX. RACHEL, b. 10 Oct., 1785, d. 16 Dec, 1849, m. first, in 1805, Henry Traugh, 

b. 26 Sep., 176.5, d. 10 Dec, 18.^4; m. second., in 1836, Abraham Townsend; 
no ch. by last marriage; by Henry Traugh had ch., 
I. ScSAN, b. 4 Sep., 1808, m. Solomon Probst, a desc. of Philip Probst, who 
emigrated in 1693 from Probstzell, near Saalfeld, Sa.xony; their 
ch., Barbara Ann, m. first, Abraham Bernard Block, a native of 
France; m. second, Peter A. Kimburg, and now lives at Columbia, 
Lancaster Co., Pa. ; her son is Colonel Williard T. Block, of Des 
Moines, Iowa, b. in Jan., 1853, who for 21 years has been prominent 
in railroad circles of Peuna. and the West, and has twice been ap- 
pointed to the staff of the Governor of Iowa; Henry Clay, anotLer 
son of Susan Probst, lives at Minneapolis, Kansas; Samuel McL. at 
Hastings, Neb., and Isidor, her dau., m. George Brockway, and 
lives at Indianapolis, Iowa. 

II. Henry, b. 11 Feb., 1811, dec; his widow Rachel lives at Berwick, Col. 
Co., Pa. 

ni. Peter, b. 31 July, 1812, dec. His dau. Mrs. Alice Brown, lives at West 
Pittston, Luzerne Co., Pa. 

IV. Lewis, b. 26 Nov.. 181.5, d. 5 Nov., i860, m. 7 Dec, 1842, Mary Ann, dau. 
of Samuel Adams, of Briar Creek, Pa. ; their ch., Rachel Arabelle, 
b. 31 Jan., 1844, m. in 1873, Dillwyn S. Stein, res. Hazleton, Luzerne 
Co., Pa.; no ch.; Williard Sand, b. 25 Mch.. 1848, killed on the rail- 
road at Weatherly, Pa., 26 June, 1872; Mary Frances, h. 24 Dec, 
1850, m. in 1863, Capt. Samuel Simpson, of Jeansville, Pa., b. 30 
Nov., 1844; has 2 ch. Capt. Simpson enlisted in Co. F., 143rd Regt. 
Pa. Vols., served 3 j'ears taking part in battles of Chancellorsville, 
Gettysburg. Wilderness, Spottsylvania, North Anna, and others, 
I commissioned captain by Governor Curtin for meritorious ser- 

vices and served as captain of militia during the strikes in the 
coal region. 
V. Washington, b. 5 Mch., 1817, d. 24 July. 1838, unm. 

VI. Ann Eliza, b. 18 Mch., 1819, d. 21 Sep., 1840 unm. 

VII. Olivia Eve, b. 14 Oct., 1822, m. Jesse C. Buck, res. Nescopeck, Col. Co., 

Pa., b. 12 July, 181G; their 4ch., Mary Alice, b. in 1849, d. in 1853; 
Charles B., b. in 18:50, d. in 1853; Henry T., b. 3 June. 1854, res. 2545 
Reese St., Phila. ; Jacob L., b. 27 Oct., 1855, m. in 1876, Phoebe Van 
Horn, and has 4 ch. 

VIII. Rachel, b. 25 July. 1825, ra. in 1848, John Williams, b. 23 May, 1821; their 

ch., Milton F., a merchant and justice of peace at Nescopeck, Col. 
Co., Pa., b. 26 Mar., 1849, ra. in 1873, Alice S. Adams, b. 25 Sep.. 
1850, and has 5 ch.; Susan Elizabeth, b. 24 Sep., 1850, m. in 1872, 
Oliver E. Yohey, and has 2 ch.; Henry Clay, b. 23 Dec, 1851, m. 
Susan Smith; Harriet Maria, b. 23 May, 1853, m. Eber H. Roth; 



Ch. of Philip Leidy and Henry Melick. 707 

John Wesley, b. 6 Aug., 1855, m. Frankie Creasy; William L., a 
teacher, b. 15 Feb., 1S66. 
IX. Nancy, b. 15 Mch., 1827, d. in Infancy. 

26. X. MARGARET, m. George Wirtz, of Columbia Co., Pa. 

27. XI. CATHERINE, b. in Col. Co., Pa., 27 Jan., 1790, d. in Phila., 28 May, 1825, m. 

Philip, son of Jacob and Catherine Leidy, b. in Hatfield tp., Montgo- 
mery Co., Pa., 5 Dec, 1791, d. in Phila., 9 Oct., 1862; had ch. 
I. Peter, b. 28 Dec, 1819, d. 29 Aug., 1820. 
II. Catherine, b. 7 Aug., i82i, d. 20 Nov., 1822. 

III. Joseph, b. 9 Sep., 1823, m. Anna, dau. of Robert Harden, dec. ; no ch. 

M. D., 1844, Univ. Pa.; LL. D, 188(3, Univ. Harvard. Prosector 

Anat., Prof. Anat. 185.3, Univ. Pa. . ; Director and Prof. Zoology 

and Compar, Anat. Biological Dept. 1884, Univ. Pa. . ; Prof. Nat. 

Hist. Swarthmore Coll. 1871-85; P. Faculty Wagner Free Instit. Sc. 
1885; Demonstrator Anat. Franklin Med. Coll. 1847-52. Memb. 
Acad. Nat. Sc. Philad. July, 1845, P. 1882; Amer. Philos. Soc. Oct. 
1849; Amer. Med. Assoc. 1854; Philad. Co. Med. Soc; Boston Soc. 
Nat. Hist. 1845; New York Acad. Sc. 1843; Hesse Nat. Hist. Soc. 1848; 
Amer. Acad. Arts and Sc. 1849; Biological Soc. Paris, 1851; Moscow, 
Soc. Naturalists, 1852; Mons. Soc Sc. 1854; Elliot Soc. Nat. Hist. 
Charleston, S. C. 1855; St. Louis Acad. Sc. 18.56; London Zoological 
Soc. 1857; Leopold Carol. Acad. Sc, Bonn, 1857; Munich Acad. Sc. 
1858; Prague Bohem. Acad. Sc. 1800; Zoological and Botan. Soc. 
Vienna, 18G1; Econom. Agricult. Acad. Florence, 1801; Geological 
Soc. London, 1803; Nat. Hist. Soc. Dublin, 186;3; National Acad. Sc. 
U. S. 186.3; Esse.x Instit. Salem, Mass. 1800; Linnean Soc. London, 
1872; Anthropological Soc. London, 1872; Cherbourg Soc. Nat. Sc. 
1873; Nat. Hist. Soc. Mexico, 1874; Liverpool Lit. and Philos. Soc. 
1877; Washington Biological Soc. 1884; Copenhagen Soc. Sc. 1886. 
Pathologist St. Joseph's Hosp. 1852; Contract. Surg. U. S. A. Gen- 
eral Hosp. Philad. 1862-05. Fellow of the College of Physicians 
Philada., 1851; res. Philadelphia, Pa. 

IV. Thomas, b. 21 May, 1825, d. 20 Apl., 1870, m. 13 Sep., 1849, Rebecca, dau. 

Joseph Johns, d. in 1853. 

THIRD GENERATION (E.) 
Henry Melick (5) had 7 ch. 

28. I. MARY, b. 2 Aug., 1790, d. 9 May, I860, m. 2 Nov., 1814, Henry Martin Trembley, 

b. 25 Jan., 1787, d. 8 July, 1837; had 5 ch. 
I. John, b. 24 July, 1815, d. 29 June, 1871, had 4 daus. and 4 sons, all dec. 
but Ellis C, res. Council Grove, Morris Co., Kansas, and WilUain A., 
res. Afton, Columbia Co., Pa. 
II. Henry, b. 2 Dec, I816, d. 12 Feb., 1S7S, and had 2 sons and 4 daus., of 
which are living, KUsha P., Mary E., Sarah C, who m. P. Jacob], 
res. Alton, Col. Co., Pa., and Bernetta, who m. G. Mills, res. Afton, 
Col. Co., Pa. 

III. Sarah, b. 14 Aug.. 1819. d. 2 Sept.. 1837. 

IV. William, b. 9 Dec... 1822, d. 25 Sept., 1853, m., no ch. 

V. Harriet, b. 25 Mch., 1825, m. 24 Feb., 1847, David Whitmire, who lives at 
Espy, Col. Co., Pa., and was b. 9 Nov., 1820; their ch., Mary Ellen, b. 
24 Oct., 1850, m. 30 May, 1872; William E. Dietlick, who lives at Espy, 
Col. Co., Pa., and was b. 28 Feb., 1849; Anna Clara, b. 28 Nov., 1853, d. 
in infancy; Myrtilla G., b. 6 Aug., 1857, d. in infancy. 

29. II. SAMUEL, b. 10 Feb., 1790, d. 13 Jan., 1887, m.Jlrst, in Feb., 1820, Sarah Brown, 

b. 2 Feb., 1795, d. oNov., 1861; m. second, in 1863, Lavinla Mosteller; for 
5 ch. see p. 7ii. 

30. III. JOHN, of Light-Street, Pa., b. 22 Jan., 1799, d. 11 Oct., 1875, ra. Martha 

Creveling, b. 1 Feb., 1793, d. 2 Dec, 1853. For 8 ch. see p. 711. 

31. IV. SUSAN, m. George B. Sloan, of Briar Creek, Col. Co., Pa., b. 28 Aug., 1802, 

d. in 1858; had 4 ch., 
I. Samuel, b. 26 Aug., 1820, d. in 1843 by being drowned in the Pa. canal; 

he was a merchant at Light-Street, Pa. 
II. Mary Jane, b. in 1861, m. Joseph Robbins, who lives at Greenwood, 
Pa. 



708 Ch. of G. B. Sloax, Chester Smith & ]\1ichael Melick. 

III. Margaret B., ra. 12 Oct., 1.S53, Isaiah Melick. (60) res. Dixon, III.; he 

was born G Mch., 18:24; for 7 ch see p. 713. 

IV. Martha Ehzaueth, b. 13 Mch., 18.35, m. 8 Jan.. 1858, Henry Wesley 

Creasy, b. 7 Oct., 1825, d. 30 Oct., 1868; her res. Bloorasburg. Pa.; 
their 5 ch., Mary Ellis, b. 26 Mch., 18o9, d. in infancy; Wilbur Fisk, 
twin, b. 20 Mch., 18.53, d. in mtsii\cy; Samuel crj/^oM, a lumber mer- 
chant ol' Blooinsburg, Pa., b. 21 Nov., 1860; Mayjte A., b. 17 Feb., 
IHGT, d. 9 Nov.. 1871; George Edwin, b. 29 May, 1863, d. 23 Sep., 1868. 

32. V. RACHEL, b. G Nov., 1794, d. 19 Sep., 1875, m. Chester Smith, b. 30 Sep., 17M, d 

19 Aug., 18G5; had 5 ch., 
I. Miriam, b. 3 Nov., 1823, m. John Kitgus, res. Huutersville, Lycoming 

Co., Pa. 
II. Clarissa, b. ll June, 182.5, m. John Edgar, res. Trenton, Col. Co., Pa. 

III. Martha, b. l Sep., 1820, d. l Sep., iS^, ra. Jacob Christian, res. Derrs, 

Col. Co., Pa., and has 7 sons and 2 daus. 

IV. Thkodore W., res. Dens, Col. Co., Pa., b. .30 May, 1821, m. 12 Oct., 1865, 

and had one ch., Julia, b. 5 Nov., 1829, unm., res. Derrs, Col. Co., 
N Pa. 
V. Thomas F., res. Clifton, Munro Co., N. Y., b. 21 July, 1833, m. 12 May, 
1809. Euphemia Curtis, dau. of Nathan Tyler, of Sullivan Co., N. 
Y. ; a clergyman, graduated in 180G at Lewisburg University, Pa. ; 
and has 2 ch. 

33. VI. DANIEL, b. 1 Jan., 1806, m. 14 May, 1827, Sarah, dau. of John Hazelett, of 

N. J., b. in 1807, d. in June, 1SG8. For 8 ch. see p. 712. 

34. VII. SARAH, m. Asa Evered. 

THIRD GENERATION (Ej. 

Michael Melick (6) had 6 ch. 

35. I. MARIE, b. 10 Jan., 178.5, d. 10 Aug., 1870, ra.#j-s<, Captain, afterwards Com- 

modore Burbank, of the U. S. Navy, who d. at Buenos Ayres, S. A., 
about 1820; he was an officer of the American frigate "Constitution" 
at the time of her tight with the British ship "Guerrier;" she m. second, 
Jacob Coats, of England; no ch. 

36. II. JOHANNES, b. 20 May, 1787, d. in Oct., 184.3, ra. in 1819, Julianna, dau. of John 

Myers; he served in war of 1812; had ch. 

I. Christiana, b. 20 Oct., 1821, dec, ra. James Crommie; their son JoluVs 

address is 13 North Tenth Street, Phila. 

II. Catherine, b. 2 Nov., 1826, m. 9 July, 1846. Thomas A. Ward; res. 244 

Juniper Street, Phila., b. 17 Mch., 1828,- has one ch. Henry, b. 27 
May, 1851, is married and has one son. 

III. Henry, b. 16 July, 1829, unra., res. 244 Juniper St., Phila. 

IV. Emma, b. 2 Feb., 1839, m. a Mr. Bryan; res. 1743 North 13th St., Phila." 

37. III. PETER, b. 26 Mch., 17«9, d. 7 Mch., 1820, m. in 1815, Susannah, dau. of John 

Myers, b. in 17.58, d. in 1833; he served in war of 1812; had ch. 
I. Catherine, b. 18 June, 1810, d. in infancy. 

II. Mary Ann, b. 3 Nov., 1818. d. in Infancy. 

III. Juliana, b. 17 Jan., 1820. m. James Lee, b. in 1822, d. in 1883; her res. 
755 South 15th St., Phila. 

38. IV. AMELIA, b. 12 Jan., 1791, d. in Infancy. 

89. V. SAMUEL, b. about 1794, d. unra., final audit of his estate was dated 2d July, 

1827; sei'ved in war of 1812. 
40. VI. CHRISTIANA, b. 29 July, 1797, d. 6 Jan., 1881, m.. as second wife (see 27), 
25 May, 1826, Philip Leidy, b. 5 Dec., 1791, d. in Phila., 9 Oct., 1862, served 
in war of 1812; had ch. 
I. Christiana Taliana, b. 22 Feb., 1827, d. 24 Oct., 1878, ra. 4 June, 1849, 
James Cyrus Uraberger, b. in 1817, d. 18 Sep., 1855 ; their 
2 ch., Caroline Julia who m. a Mr. Parker and lives at 717 
Spruce St., Phila.. James Uorace.h. 1852, d. in 1884; res. of widow 
1536 North 8th St., Phila. 
II. Francis, b 14 Dec, 1828, d. 3 June, 1856. unm. 

III. Asher. b. 3 July, 18.30, d. 6 July, 1878, ra. 14 Apl., 1851, Almira, dau. of 

Henry Lechler; he was colonel of 99th Pa. Regt., Keaineys Bri- 
gade, and Brevet Brigadier General, seriously wounded at Fred- 



Ch. of Philip Leidy aisd Henry Malick. 709 

ericksburg. Va., Dec, 1862; their 2 ch., Philip Henry, b. 25 Oct.. 
1853; Francis James, h. 14 Dec, 1856; d. In 1864. 

IV. Helen, b. 30 Sep., 1333, d. 3 Dec, 1839. 

V. Catherine Melick, b. 28 Mch., 183V, d. 12 Aug-., 1839. 
VI. Philip, res. 526 Marshall St., Phlla., b. 29 Dec, 1838, m. 15 Feb., 1865, 
Penelope Maury, dau. of Robert Isaac Watts Polk, of Winchester, 
Va. Philip Leidy received degree of M.D. 1859, Univ. Pa. Memb. 
Medico-Chirurgical Soc P. 1868; Amer. Med. Assoc. 1870; Philad. 
Co. Med. Soc. 1876; Med. Soc. State Pa. 1878; Juniata Valley Med. 
Soc. 1882; Med. Jurisprudence Soc. Philad. 1883; Neurological Soc. 
Philad. 18S6; Northern Med. Soc. Philad. P. 1885. Resid. Phys. 
Philad. Hosp. 1859-61; Surg. U. S. Vol. 1861-65; IT. S. Exam. Surg, for 
Pensions 1866-70; Port Phys. Philad. 1874-83; Consult. Phys. Home 
for Incurables 1875-78; Consult. Phys. Odd Fellows' Home 1878-87; 
Phys. in Chief, Philad. Hosp. Insane Dept., 1886; Consult. Phys. 
Philad. Hosp. for the Insane, 1887; Memb. (Sectional) Board of 
Education. Fellow of the College of Physicians of Philada., Con- 
sulting Physician Masonic Home, Odd Fellows' Orphanage. Medi- 
cal Directors, Dept. of Shenandoah, Va., 18G4. Member of the 
Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States and 
Gi-and Array of the Republic, Soc. Army of Potomac, etc., etc., 
•etc.; their ch., Joseph, b. 11 Apl., 1866; James Fontaine roUc, b. 10 
Jan., 1869, d. in infancy; Clarence Maury, b. 28 June, 1873; Gertrude 
Harwooa, b. 31 Oct., 1879.; Katherine Meliclc, b. 2 May, 1882. 

FOURTH GENERATION (E). 

Henry Malick (lo) had 5 ch. 

41. I. SOPHIA JANE, b. 25 Apl., 1827, d. 25 Aug., 1833. 

42. II. CATHERINE, b. 29 Dec, 1828. d. 26 Mch., 1857, m. Luther Wright, of West 

Mill Creek; had 2 ch., 
I. Henry, lives at Battle Creek, Mich. 

43. III. SAMUEL BARRIS, b. 12 Sep., 18.30, d. in California 20 June, 1871, just after 

his marriage; no ch. 

44. IV. JOHN WESLEY, res. Platea, Erie Co., Pa., b. 27 May, 1434, m. 7 Sep., 1854, 

Emeline Johnson, of Springfield, Pa.; has 5 ch., 
I. Ida, d. when 27 years old. 
II. Samuel W.. of Huntington, W. Virginia. 

III. Frank, b. 9 Apl., 1867, m. 12 May, 1888, Mary, dau. of Michael B. Bain, 

of Conneautville, Pa., b. in 1850. 

IV, Maud. 

V. George. 

45. V. HENRY' PRESTON, b. 22 Aug., 18.37, d. 4 Nov., 1888, m. 24 Dec, 1861, Lucy, 

dau. of Ethan Loveridge, of Girard, Pa., where she now resides, b. 11 
Jan., 1835; had3ch.. 
I. Caroline Elizabeth, b. Feb., 1864. 
II. Grace Adelia, b. 19 Feb., 1865. 
III. Herbert Preston, b. 31 July, 1806. 

FOURTH GENERATION (E.) 

Jacob Melick \ig) had 13 ch. 

46. I. NORMAN L., b. 20 Feb., 1828, d. 16 July, 1832. 

47. II. BERNETTA, b. 29 July, 1829, d. 15 Oct., 1880, m. 10 May, 1848, George, son of 

Rev'd George Boyd, D. D., of Phila., b. 10 Nov.. 1826, d. 17 Nov., 1885; 
had9ch., 
I. George Jacob, b. 28 Apl., 18 49, d. 16 Mch., 1850, 
II. Elizabeth Livingston, b. 8 Oct., 1850. d. 5 Dec, 1855. 

III. WiLLET Livingston, res. 209 North Water St., Phila., b. 20 Feb., 1856, 

m. 30 May, I8S0, Sopbia, dau. of James C. Allen, of Phila., and have 
3 ch., Catherine Allen, b. i« Dec, ln82; Livingston, b. G Juno, 1887, d. 
in infancy, and Jiernetca, b. 10 Aug., 1888. 

IV. George Melick, M. D., b. 11 Aug., 1861, res. 17H2 N. 16 St., Phila.; grad- 

uated in 1882 at the University of Pa. ; now practicing medicine. 



710 Ch. of Jacob and P. Melick of Light-Street, Pa. 

V. Robert Thomas, b. 22 May, 1863, res. 1702 N. 16 St., Phila. 
VI. Agnes Ellis, b. 17 July. ISC'?. 
VII. Sarah Smuckeb, b. 11 June, 1868. 
VIII. Jacob Melick, b. 5 Jan., 1870. 
IX. Bernetta Clingman, b. 19 June. 1875, d. 3 Feb., 1888. 

48. m. CAMPASPA, b. in Nov., 1830, d. 8 July, 1876, ra. In May, 1849, George H. 

Hagenbuch, res. Williamsport, Pa., b. 25 June, 182.5; had 7 ch. 
I. Aletha E., b. 6 Jan.. 1851, m. 27 Nov., 1877. Ellis H. Masters, res. East 
Orange, N. J., b. 30 Oct., 1846, and has 2 ch., George LaRue, b. 24 
June, 1880, and Mabel h. 20 Sep., 1883. 
II. An infant son, b. in 18.53, d. in 1854. 

III. Martha M., b. 16 Feb., 1857, m. 6 June, 1878, Charles W. Hiles, res., 
Williamsport, Pa., b. 24 Apl., 184.3, and hasl ch., Miriam b. 2 Aug., 1879. 

IV. Clotilda B., b. 31 Jan., 1859. 
V. Caroline M., b. l July, 1863. 

VI. Kathrin. b. 17 Oct., 1868. 
VII. Nettie, b. 7 Apl., 1873, d. in infancy. 

49. IV. MIRANDA, b. 13 Sep., 1832, d. 22 Dec, 18.35. 

50. V. LUTHER, b. 13 Dec, 1834, d. 2 Dec, 1835. 

51. VI. ELIZABETH SARAH, b. 5 Oct., 1836, d. 31 Mar., 1877, m. 7 May, 1856, Solomon 

Sraucker, res. Phila., b. 22 June, 1830; had 8ch. 
I. Edwin M., b. 19 Feb., 1857. m. Emma, dau. of Charles Scott, of Phila., 

res. 1811 Hart St., Phila. 
II. John R. b. 8 July, 1859. 

III. Bessie, b. 21 Nov., 1861. 

IV. Benetta. b. 24 Nov., 1870. and 2 ch. d. in infancy. 

52. VII. WILHELMINA, b. 20 Apl., 1839, d. 23 Jan., 1842. 

53. VIII. SAMANTHA. b. 22 Jan., 1841, m. 21 Apl., 1864, Darlington, I. Brown, res. 

Light-Street, Pa., and has 2 ch. 
I. Mary Ella, b. 14 July, 1868. 
IL Jacob Melick, b. 8 Oct., 1870. 

54. IX. PULASKI, res. Light-Street, Col. Co., Pa., b. 2 Mch., 1843, m. 6 Dec, 1866. 

Cecilia, dau. of Benjamin Thornton, b. 13 Sep., 1844; had one child, I. 
WiLLET S., b. 18 June, 1868 

55. X. ORION, res. Light-Street, Col. Co., Pa., b. 21 Mch., 1845, m. 7 June, 1881, 

Sarah, dau. of James Backmau, b. 16 Sep., 1867; no ch. 

56. XI. QUITIMA, b. in 1847, d. in infancy. 

57. XII. LEONI, counsellor-at-law, of Phila., b. 5 May, 1851, unm. 

58. XIII. RACHEL, b. in 1853, d. in infancy. 

FOURTH GENERATION (E). 

Peter Melick (20) had 13 ch. 

59. I. JACOB B., res. Lyons, Iowa, b. 7 Oct., 1820, m. first 16 June 1842, Mary, dau 

of Adam Hilliard, whod. 21 Sep., 1851; second, 1 Feb., 1852, Martha, dau. 
of Benjamin F. iieeser; for 5 ch. see p. 713. 

60. II. ISAIAH S., res. Dixon, 111., b. 6 Mch., 1824, m. 12 Oct., 1853, Margaret B. 

Sloan; for 7 ch. see p. 713. 

61. III. DELILAH, b. 21 Nov., 1825, d. in Feb., 1865, m. 7 Apl., 1847, Andrew Best, 

of Col. Co., Pa., his present res. Lock Haven, Pa., had ch. 
I. Mary M., b. in Clinton Co., Pa., in August. 1848, m. in Dec, 1865. G. W. 
Macdonald. of same Co., b. 5 Sep., 1845, res. Atchison, Kansas; 
their ch., Allason A., b. in July, 1873, and George, b. in Apl., 1880. 
II. Petek Melick, res. Kansas City, Mo., b. in Clinton Co., Pa., 24 July. 
1852, m. 22 Juno, 1887. Ella M. Cole, dau. of H. C. Cole, of Lawrence, 
Kansas, b. in Charlestown, Mass.; has one ch., Ella M., h. 24 Dec, 
1888. 

III. Bernetta Rachael, b. iu Clinton Co., Pa., 14 Dec, 1854, d. 7 May, 1877, 

in Kansas City, Mo., m. to George Robinson, b. i n Maine, d. 
in Mo. 31 Dec, 1849; they left one ch. George. 

IV. Lloyd Byron, res. Ogde.i, Utah Terr., b. 4 Sep., 1856, unm. 

V. Lily Ellen, b. in Clinton Co., Pa.. 9 Jan., 186,3, m. 31 Dec. 1885. in Mo., 
D. L. M. Reanes, b. in 1859, res. Kansas City, Mo., has one ch., Ruth 
:>elila?), b. 31 Oct., 1886. 



Ch. of Samuel and John Melkk. 711 

62. IV, PETER B., res. Lock Haven, Pa., b. 22 July, 18-27, m. 24 June, 1862, Mary Eliza- 

beth dau. of Judg-e John J. Dentler; had ch., 
I. Nellie G., b. 5 Apl., 18G3. 
II. Mary, b. 24 Nov., 1866, d. 29 Jan., 1S67. 
III. Blanche, b. 5 Nov., 1868, d. l Aug., 1809. 

63. V. RACHEL B., b. 26 Apl., 1829, m. Rev. E. H. Waring, res. Oskaloosa, Iowa. 

had two ch., Ed)nund, who is deceased, end liachel B. 

64. VI. CHARLES FOREST, b. 31 Jan., 1831, d. 3 Mch., 1854, at Moscow, Virginia, by 

the explosion of a cannon. 

65. VII. HIRAM B., b. 27 Feb.. 1838, res. Williamsport, Pa. 

.66. VIII. ANNA MARGARET, b. 26 Aug., 1835, m. Daniel Shane, res. Burns, La 
Cross Co., Wis. 

67. IX. PHEBE S., b. 8 Mch., 1837, m. 23 Feb., 1860, Zeboth Oman, res. Burr Oak, 

Michigan, b. 5 Jan., 1835; had ch., 
I. Ella Margaret, b. 6 Aug., 1861, m. 29 May, 1883, Freemont Burk- 
holder, res. Goshen, Indiana, b. 7 Dec, 18.56. 
II. Alta Catherine, b. 13 Nov., 1863, m. 7 Oct., 1884, Delzon Crooks, res. 
Goshen, Indiana, b. 5 July, 1854. 

III. Mary Dell, b. 6 Oct., 1865. 

IV. Ada Rachel, b. 12 Oct., 1867. 
V. Samuel Willis, b. 8 Feb., 1870. 

VI. Mabel May, b. 27 May, 1878. 

68. X. ABNER D., res. Los Angeles, Cal., b. 2 Dec, 1838, unm. 

69. XI. LAVINA I., b. 6 Nov., 1840, m. 1 Jan., 1879, Dr. Henry Adam Hendrix, res. 

New Freedom, York Co., Pa., b. 23 Jan., 1828. 

70. XII. WILSON D., res. Sunbury, Pa., b. 19 Oct.. 1S42, m. 28 Mch., 1867, Sarah 

Josephine, dau. of Joseph Brittaln, of Luzerne Co., Pa. ; had ch., I. 
Olive Logan, b. 29 Nov., 1868; II. Ralph Lashell, b. lo Jan., 1872; 
III. Charles Forest, b. 16 Oct., 1874; IV. Anna Margaret, b. 24 May, 
1876; V. Harry Vincent, b. 8 June, 1880; VI. George Ottis, b. 30 
Jan., 1885. 

71. XIII. MARY CATHERINE, b. 18 Aug., 1844, d. in 1857. 

FOURTH GENERATION (E). 
Samuel Melick (29) had 5 ch. 

72. I. JULIA A., b. 8 Apl.. 1821, m. 12 Dec, 1842, Joseph E. Barkley; had 3 ch., 

I. Sarah, b. 23 Feb., 1844, m. in 1869, Chester S. Ferman. 
II. Gloveina, b. 9 Jan., 1848, m. in 1870, Elias R. Ferman. 
III. Clara J., b. 21 Jan., i860, d. 23 Sep.. 1880. 

73. II. ALMIRA, b. 17 Feb., 1827, m. 23 Jan.. 1850. John A. Funston, now pres. of the 

Bloomsburg Banking Co,, of Columbia Co., Pa., b. 9 Feb. 1820; had 3 
ch., 
I. Miretta Sarah, b. 17 Jan., 1851, m. 1 Jan., 1878, Paul E. Wirt; their 
ch., Karl F., b. 11 Oct., 1878; Pauline, b. 24 Apl., 1881, and Max Es- 
terly, b. 9 Nov., 1885. d. in infancy. 
II. EvA Lilian, b. 26 June, 1855, m. 24 Nov., 1880, H. O. Rodgers, res. Haz- 
leton. Pa. ; their ch., Estella, b. in July, 1887, and Kenneth F., b. 11 
Sep., 1888. 
III. Charles Wesley, b. 10 Jan., 1859, unm. 

74. III. JAMES D., res. 2219 South Broad St., Phila., b. 12 Sep., 1829, m. In 1851, Har- 

riet Bettle, of Wilkes-Barra, Pa., and has 4 ch. 

75. IV. WESLEY, a physician of Osage, Vernon Co., Mo., b. 13 Nov., 1831, m. 8 June, 

18.59, Mary, dau. of Leonard Dodge, b. 24 Sep., 1840; had 9 ch., 
I. Anna B., b. 29 Aug., IS60, m. Constantine T. Whitfield, and has 3 ch. : 
II. Leonard, b. in 1862; III. Victor, b. in 1867; IV. Prince, b. in 
1869 ; V. Ida, b. in 1871; VI. Laila. b. in 1874; VII. Unis, b. in 1876; 
VIII. Effie. b. in 1878; IX., Beula. b. In 1881 

76. V. WILLIAM B., b. 17 Apl., 1835, m. Mary Bracken, of Phlla. 

FOURTH GENERATION (E). 
John Melick (30) had 8 ch. 

77. I. JUSTUS A. (Rev.), born at Light-Street, Pa., 11 March. 1823, d. at Harrisburg, 

22 March, 1886, m. first, 29 Oct., 1851. Emeline E., dau. of John Patchin, 



712 Ch. of Rev. Justus and Daniel Melick. 

of 'Clearfield Co.. Pa., d. 5 Aug., 1862; m. second, 22 June, 1864, Ann 
Dunmire, of McVeytown, Pa., who lives at 800 Elder street, Harris- 
burg, Pa. After bein^ educated at Harford, Pa., Academy, and at 
Genessee Wesleyan Seminary, at Lima. N. Y., he in 1848 entered the 
Methodist ministry, supplyin;^ successive pulpits in Pa. and N. J. 
until 1877, when he was incapacitated by ill health from further work 
in the itinerancy. All testimony concurs in naming Mr. Melick's 
ministry as being of great value and helpfulness to his several 
charges. His biographer mentions him as a mighty exhorter who 
had wonderful f ervencj- and liberty in prayer, and says that his char- 
acter was built upon solid pillars of integrity and domed over with 
a cheerful, constant faith in God. " While he was broad enough to 
appreciate and admire with fraternal regard the character and work 
of other denominations, he was a thorough Methodist. He loved the 
doctrines and enjoyed the experience, and glorified the polity and 
emulated the heroic examples which have given distinction to 
Methodism. Living a quiet, peaceful life in all godliness and hon- 
esty, fulfilling his ministry amid the toils of the itinerancy with zeal 
and effectiveness, never striving for place or power, unpretentious, 
genuine and true, our brother has left behind him an influence and a 
name which will not soon be forgotten." Had ch. 
I. Maky, b. 1.3 Dec, 1856, m. 27 Apl., 1885, George B. Dunmire, M. D., res. 

1116 Arch St., Phila., Pa.; no ch. 
II. John P.. res. 802 North Second St., Harrisburg, Pa., Deputy Prothon- 
otary and Clerk of Courts, b. 18 Aug., 1858, m. 20 Oct., 1887, Eliza- 
beth K., dan. of Joseph M. Black, of Harrisburg, Pa. 
III. Emma, b. 31 Jan., 1861. res. 800 Elder St., Harrisburg, Pa. 

78. II. HARRIET, b. 22 Aug., 182.5, ra. in 1853, James W. Sankey, b. in 1833, res. 253 

Boas St., Harrisburg, Pa., and has one ch., Emma, b. in 1861. 

79. III. HENRY, res. Atalissa, Muscatine Co., Iowa, b. 20 Sep., 1827, m. 16 Oct., 1851, 

Martha A., dau. of George Wirt, b. 2 Oct., 1831; had 4 ch., 
I. Millard Fillmore, b. 5 Nov., 1853, m. 20 Dec, 1877, Nina M. Barka- 

low. 
II. John Warren, b. 5 Sep., 1855, m. 5 Sep., 1376, MoUie A. Croxon. 

III. Justus A., b. 5 Sep., 1857, m. 23 Dec, 1886, Eva Kline. 

IV. TantaB., b. 15 July, 1864. 

80. IV.. CHARITY LOUISA, b. 27 Aug., 1829, d. 13 June, 1349. 

81. V. JOHN NELSON, res. Hiner's Run, Clinton Co., Pa., b. 23 Dec, 1832, ra. and 

has 3 ch. 

82. VI. MARTHA JANE, b. 2 Oct., 1834, d. in March, 1879, m. a Mr. Mead, and had 

one ch.. Bertha, who m. John Barnet, a merchant of Schickshiny. 

83. VII. MARGARET EMILY, b. 2 Apl.. 1836, d. 17 Jan.. 1842. 

84. VIII. EMMA. b. 15 Feb.. 1844, m. 30 Jan., 1807, John M. C. Ranck, lawyer, res. 

Light-Street, Col. Co.. Pa., b. 19 April, 1831; had 4 ch. 
I. Harriet Alwilda, b. 17 Oct., 1868, II. Horatio Pierce, b. 8 
Dec, 1870; III. John Handley. b. 9 Dec, 1879; IV. Edward 
Melick. b. 10 May. 1885. 

FOURTH GENERATION. 

Daniel Melick (33) had 8ch. 

85. I. HARVEY, res. Shlloh, Ohio, b. 5 June, 1829, ra. 16 Sep., 1852. Elizabeth, dan. 

of Frederic Smalley, of Cumberland Co., Pa. ; had one dau., b. 22 Mch., 
1854, who is married and has 2 ch. 

86. II. MARY, b. 27 Aug., 1831, unm. 

87. III. AMANDA, b. 25 July, 1836. 

88. IV. ARAMINTA, b. 5 Jan., 1838, m. 18 Dec, 1806, Jacob Kaylor; res. Shiloh, 

Ohio; had 4 ch. ; 3 sons and 1 dau. 

89. V. VIRGINIA, b. 8 Nov., 1840, m, 17 Sep., 1868, William Baldwin, res. Shiloh, 

Ohio. 

90. VI. BENSON, b. 5 Mar., 1843, d. in the Union Army 3 Sep., 1864. 

91. VII. ALVERNON. b. 28 Feb., 1846, m. 21 Sep., 1869, Orville Squires, res. Green. 

wich, Huron Co.. Ohio, b. 27 Mch.. 1.H37, in Steuben Co.. N. Y.; had ch.; 
I. Wilbur B.. b. 11 June, 1872; II. Roy 8., b. 25 July, 1876, res. 
Ganges, Ohio. 



Ch. of Jacob B. and Isaiah Melick. 713 

92. vni. SARAH, res. Ganges, O., b. 24 Oct., 1854, m. 31 Dec, 1885, Joseph Hisey, b. 

10 June, 1833; their 1 ch., Beulah, b. 27 Jan., 1887. 

FIFTH GENERATION (E.) 

Jacob B. Melick (59) had 3 ch by first wife. 

93. I. STEWART PIERCE, res. Dallas Center, Iowa, b. 5 Aug., 1844, in. 25 Feb., 1869, 

Augusta H., dau. of Charles P. Partridge, of De Kalb Co., 111. ; had ch, 
I. Mary Alice, b. 14 Oct., 1870, d. 23 Dec, 1872. 
II. Louis Earle, b. 27 Dec, 1871. 

III. Jay B., b. 6 Sep., 1873, d. in infancy. 

IV. Martha Augusta, b. 5 May, 1876. 
V. Charles Stewart, b. 3 Feb., 1879. 

94. II. SARAH E., b. 7 Oct., 1846, m. 16 June, 1870, Williard Ives Tripp, of Water- 

town, N. Y., present res. 1522 South 11th St., Omaha, Neb., b. 25 June, 
1842; hade ch. 
I. Frank S., b. 26 May, 1871, d. in infancy. 
II. Robert B., b. 2 Sep., 1873. 

III. George W., b. 19 July, 1875. 

IV. Nelly May, b. 28 Aug., 1878, d. in infancy. 
V. Albert Lee, b. 24 May, 1881, d. in infancy. 

VI. Lewis B., b. 21 Aug., 1883. 

95. ni. JOLILA, b. 7 Dec, 1849, d. 18 Sep., 1851. 

Jacob B., (.59) had 2 ch. by second wife. 

96. I. EDGAR B., b. 2 Jan., 1854' d. 21 July, 1885. 

97. II. LULU M., b. 6 June, 1858, m. 3 Jan., 1888, Stephen Porter Harlan, of Cecil 

Co., Md., present res. Rincon, New Mexico, where he is supt. of bridges 
and buildings of A. T. and S. P. R. R., b. 2 Dec, 1848; had one ch. 
I. Jacob Melick, b. 17 Oct., 1888. 

FIFTH GENERATION (E.) 

Isaiah Melick (60) had 7 ch. 

98. I. BYRON, b. 21 Feb., 1854, d. in Aug., 1855. 

99. II. OTTIS, res. Adrian, Minnesota, b. 16 Nov., 1855, ra. in Mch., 1886, Emma 

Reese, of Dodgeville, Wis. 

100. III. LILLIE, b. 28 June, 1859, d. in Chicago, where she held a position as teacher 

and stenographer, 24 Oct., 1855. 

101. IV. ABRO P., b. G Sept., 1860, d. 12 Dec, 1861. 

102. V. WALTER SCOTT, res. Neenach, Los Angeles Co.. Cal., b. 13 Mch., 186.3, grad- 

uated at Northern Illinois Normal College, and is now ii? the Stock, 
Bond, and Real Estate business in Los Angeles. 

103. VI. MATTIE E., b. 13 Mch., 1866, d. 20 Jan., 1855. 

104. VII. CLYDE M., b. 29 Nov., 1869. 



ADI3E>JDA. 



The monument to be seen in the foreground of the illustration of the Evangelical 
Head Church at Bendoi-f on the Rhine (page 92) was erected by the municipality In 
honor of soldiers from that place, who served in the war of 1770-71 against France. 
A marble tablet records that among others whom the shaft is Intended to honor la 
Carl MOlich of the 3d Hohenzollern Regiment, who, being wounded at the bloody 
battles of Gorze and Metz. on the fourteenth and eighteenth of August, 1870, died 
on the eighth of October, at the military hospital In the Castle of Engers. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



Albany, R. Pearson's Genealogies, and 
First Settlers in. 

America, Annals of, by Abiel Holmes, 
D. D. 

America, Letters from. Between the 
Years 1760 and 1767, by Edward 
Eddis. 

America, Narrative and Critical His- 
tory of, by Justin Winsor. 

America, Tlie British Empire in, by 
J. Oldmixon. 

America, Winterbottom's History of. 

American Antiquarian Society, Part 
I of Vol. V, New England Slave 
Trade, by Wm. B. Weeden. 

American Biography, Library of, by 
Jared Sparks. 

American Theatre, by William Dun- 
lap. 

Arts of Design, History of, by Wil- 
liam Dunlap. 

Axtell Record, The 

Bangs, Lieut. Isaac, of the Mass. Mi- 
litia, Journal of, Proc. of N, J. 
Hist. Soc, 1st Series, Vol. VIII. 

Baptists, Benedict's History of the 

Basking Ridge Presbyterian Church, 
History of, by Rev. John C. Ran- 
kin, D. D. 

Bedminster Church History, by Rev. 
Henry P. Thompson. 

Bell, Andrew, Journal During March 
of British through the Jerseys, 
1778, Proc. N. J. Hist. Soc, Ist 
Series, Vol. VI. 

Bergen, Annals of the Classis of, by 
Rev. Benj. C. Taylor, D. D. 

Bergen Family, The, by Teunis Ber- 
gen. 

Bertholf, Rev. Guillaume, Aaron 
Lloyd in Proc. N. J. Hist. Soc, 2nd 
Series, Vol. IX. 



Bi-Centennial History East N. J., by 

A. Q. Keasbey, Proc. N. J. Hist. 

Soc.,. 2nd Series, Vol. VII. 
Biddle, Cliarles, Autobiography of. 
Bloomfield, Gov. .Joseph, William 

Nelson, in the Proc. N. J. Hist. 

vSoc, 2nd Series, Vol. IX, 
Boundbrook Surprise, Pa. Mag. of 

Hist, and Biog., Vol. XI, p. 187. 
Burlington, The Settlement of, by 

Henry Arnitt Brown. 
Burr, Aaron, Military Record of, by 

Charles H. Peck, in Mag. Amer. 

Hist., Vol. XVIII. 
Cadwalader,Col. Lambert, a Sketch of, 

by William K. Rawle, M. A., LL. 

D., in Pa. Mag. of Hist, and Biog,, 

Vol. X., No. 1. 
Campaigns in America, My, by Count 

Wm. de Deuxponts. 
Carroll, H. H. in "One Hundred 

Years of Temperance." 
Carteret Genealogy, Proc. N. J. Hist. 

Soc, 2nd Series, Vol. I. 
Churcli in the Colonies, by Rev. 

Samuel A. Clark. 
Churches, Our Older, by Rev. Wil- 
liam W. Blauvelt, in the Somer- 

ville Magazine, "Our Home," 

1871. 
Colfax, Captain William, by William 

Nelson, in Proc N. J. Hist. Soc, 

Vol. IV. 
Colonial and Revolutionary Currency, 

by Prof. W. D. Sumner in Har- 
per's Magazine. 
Colonial Entry Book S. P.O. No. 92. 
Colonial History of the State of New 

York. 
Colonial New York, by George W. 

Schuyler. 
Colonial Salaries, by John Ruther- 



Bibliography. 



'15 



ford, in Proc. N. J. Hist. Soc, 2nd 
Series, Vol. I. 

Colonists at Home, by Edward Eg- 
gleston, in the Century Magazine, 
April, 1885. 

Constitution of the United States, 
Paper by Hon. Joseph P. Bradley 
Read before N. J. Hist. Soc, Janu- 
ary, 1851. 

Constitution, Origin of Federal, by 
Prof. Francis N. Thorpe, in Mag. 
Amer. Hist., Vol. XVIII. 

County and Township Records. 

Court Circles of the Republic, The, 
by Mrs. E. F. Ellet. 

Customs and Manners, by Thomas E. 
Osmun. 

Cutler, Mannassah, Diary of. 

Days of Old, The, by Rev. Matthew 
H. Henderson, M. A. 

Declaration of Independence, a Biog- 
raphy of the Signers of, by L. Car- 
rol Judson. 

Department of State at Trenton, rec- 
ords of. 

Documents Relating to the Colonial 
History of the State of New York, 
edited by E. B. O'Callaghan. 

Dorchester, Rev. Daniel, D. D., in 
"One Hundred Years of Temper- 
ance." 

East Jersey under the Proprietors, by 
William A. Whitehead. 

Eighteenth Century, Hitchman's Es- 
says and Studies of. 

Elizabethtown, N. J., History of St. 
John's Church, by Rev. Samuel A. 
Clark. 

English Colonies in America, by 
Henry Cabot Lodge. 

Episcopalians in Revolution, Pa. 
Mag. of Hist, and Biog., Vol XI, 
p. 171. 

Evangelical Head-Church, Bendorf, 
Germany, Archives of. 

Familiar Letters, on Public Charac- 
ters, by Sullivan. 

First Century of the Republic, Har- 
per's Magazine, No. 295, Vol. L. 

First Reformed Church, of Somer- 
ville, N. J., Archives of. 

Franklin, Benjamin, Before Parlia- 
ment in 1766, Pa. Mag. of Hist, and 
Biog., Vol. X, p. 220. 

Frelinghuysen Memorial, bv Rev. 
Talbot W. Chambers, D. D." 

French Allies, Our, by Edwin Martin 
Stone. 



French Officer, Diary of a, Mag. 
Amer. Hist., June, iSSO. 

German Valley, Blauvelt's Historical 
Sketch of the German Reformed 
and Presbyterian Church of. 

German Emigration, Christopher 
Lower's Account of, Dawson's Hist. 
Mag., Vol. IX, p. 100. 

German Exodus, The, Contribution 
to the Nineteenth Century. 

German Life in the Eighteenth and 
Nineteenth Centuries, Pictures of, 
by Gustav Freytag. 

German Slavery in North America, 
by Ernest Otto Hopp. 

German Soldiers in the Wars of the 
United States, Paper read before 
Rhode Island Hist. Soc. in 1887, 
by J. G. Rosengarten. 

German, Swiss, Dutch and French 
Immigrants in Pennsylvania, by 
Prof J. D. Rupp. 

" Good Order Established in Pennsyl- 
vania, and New Jersey in America," 
by Thomas Budd, Jr., 1685. 

Graham, Memoirs of Lieut. Gen. 
Samuel. 

Green, Ashbell, Life of, by Rev. 
James M. Jones. 

Greene, Nathanael, Life of, by Prof. 
George W. Greene. 

Hamilton, Alexander, Life of, by 
Samuel M. Smucker, A. M. 

Henry, Patrick, Tyler's Life of. 

Hessian and other German Auxili- 
aries, by Edward K. Lowell. 

Hessians, Diary of Ewald Gustav 
Schaukirk, Pastor of N. Y. Mora- 
rian Church, 1775-1783, Mag. of 
Hist, and Biog., Vol. X, No. 4. 

Historical Discourse, Millstone R. D. 
Church, by Rev. Edward Tanjore 
Corwin, D. D. 

Historical Magazine, Morrisania, Ed. 
by H. B. Dawson. 

Hudson County, History of, by 
Charles H. Winfield. 

Hunterdon County. First Century of, 
by Dr. George f. Mott. 

Hunterdon and Somerset Counties, 
History of, by James P. Snell. 

Hunterdon County, N. J.,St.Thoma'8 
('hurch of Alexandria, (Episcopa- 
lians in Revolution,) by Ilenrv 
Race, A. M., M. D., Mag. of Hist, 
and Biog., Vol. X, No. 4. 

Indians of N. J., by Samuel Allinson 
in Proc. of N. J. Hist. Soc, 2nd 
Series, Vol. IV. 



716 



The Story of an Old Farm. 



Indians, Raritan, Rev. George C. 
Schenck's Paper read before N. J. 
Hist. Soc. in May, 1851. 

Indians, The Aborigines, of N. J., by 
Archer Giftbrd in Proc. N. J. Hist. 
Soc, 1st Series, Vol. IV. 

Tappan, Tlie Massacre near Old, by 
William S. Stryker. 

Jersey Line at Battle of Brandywine, 
Mag. of Amer. Hist., Vol. XVIII, 
p. 463. 

Jerseymen, The Goodly Heritage of, 
by the Right Rev. George Wash- 
ington Doane, D. D., LL. D. 

John Jay, Life and Times of, by Wil- 
liam Whit lock. 

Johnston, Col. Philip, William S. 
Stryker in Proc. N. J. Hist. Soc, 
2nd Series, Vol. IV. 

Joseph Clark, of the Continental 
Army, The Diary of, Proc. N. J. 
Hist" Soc, 1st Series, Vol. VII. 

Journalism, History of, by Frederic 
Hudson. 

Juet's Journal, N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coil's. 

Kirchen, Buch der Corporation von 
Zion, in New Germantown, in 
West Jersey. 

Knickerbocker Life in N. Y., Last 
Days of, by A. C. Dayton. 

Knox, Memoir of Gen. Henry, by 
Francis S. Drake. 

Knox, Henry, Gen., Manuscript Pap- 
ers of, New England's Hist, and 
Gen. Soc, Boston. 

Krafit, John, Chas. Phil, von, (Hes- 
sian) Journal of, ed. by Thos. Henry 
Edsall. in Coil's N. Y. Hist. Soc, 
1882. 

Lafayette, Life of, by Bayard Tucker- 
man. 

Lamb, John, General, memoirs of the 
life and times of, by Isaac L. Leake. 

Laurens, Henry, Peter Force in Daw- 
son's Hist. Mag., Vol I, p. 132. 

Lebanon, German Reformed Church 
of, by Rev. Charles P. Waek, in the 
Somerville Magazine, "Our Home,' 
1873. 

Lee, Charles, Gen., Treason of, by 
George H. Moore. 

Lee, Charles, Papers Relating to. 
Coil's N. Y. Hist. Soc, 1873. 

Lee, Charles, Life of, by E. Lang- 
worthy. 

Letters from an American Farmer, 
by St. John. 

Lincoln, Benjamin, Gen., manuscript" 



papers in possession of S. T. Crosby, 
Esq,, flingham, Mass. 

Livingston, Life of Governor Wil- 
liam, by Sedgwick. 

Long Island, Battle of, by H. P. 
Johnston, in Vol. Ill, Pub's of the 
L. I. Hist. Soc. 

Long Island Historical Society, Me- 
moirs of. 

Long Island, History of, by Benja- 
min F. Thompson. 

Loyalists in Canada, Mag. of Amer. 
History, Vol. XVII, p. 416. 

Lutheran Church, Hist, of the Ameri- 
can, by Ernest L. Ilazelius, D. D. 

Luttrell's Diary. 

Manuscripts, Family. 

Manuscripts, Numerous in Private 
Hands. 

McDowell Family, Sketches of the, 
Dr. A. W. McDowell in the Som- 
erville Magazine, " Our Home," 
1873. 

Medicine in the American Colonies, 
Historical Sketch of State of, by 
John B. Beck. 

Memoirs of an American Lady, by 
Mrs. Anne Grant. 

Memoirs of My Own Times, by Gen- 
eral James VV'ilkinson. 

Memoirs of Sixty Years in Pennsyl- 
vania, by Graydon. 

Memorial by Col. Morris, Concerning 
the State of Religion in the Jer- 
seys, 1700, N. J. Hist. Coil's. 

Men and Manners in America One 
Hundred Years Ago, by H. E. 
Scudder. 

^liilstone Centennial Memorial, by 
Rev. Edward Tanjore Corwin. 

Mettelfranken, Germany, Archives of 
the Historical Society of. 

Monmouth County, History of, by 
Edwin Salter, in Proc N.J. Hist. 
Soc, 2nd Series, Vols. IV and V. 

Moore, Benjamin, Lieut, and Adjt., of 
Col. Moses Ilazen's Regiment ; 
Order Book, Mem. Book and Manu- 
scripts, in possession of Thomas W. 
Moore of Plainfield, N. J. 

Morgan, General Daniel, Life of, by 
James Graliam. 

Morris County, Annals of, by Rev. 
Joseph F. Tuttle. 

Morris County, Early Plistory of, by 
Rev. Joseph F. Tuttle, in Proc. N. 
J. Hist. Soc, 2nd Series, Vol. I 
and V. 



Bibliography. 



717 



Morris County, History of, Pub. by 
Munsell, 1S83. 

Morris Family, Genealogy, Proc. N. 
J. Hist. Soc, 2nd Series, Vol. VII. 

Morris, Gouverneur, Diary of. 

Morris, Mrs. Margaret, Journal of. 

Morristown, Capt. John Steele, at, 
Dawson's Hist. Mag., Vol. IX, p. 
137. 

Morristown in Revolution, by Rev. 
Jos. F. Tuttle, D. D., and Rev. 
Sam'l L. Tuttle in Dawson's Hist. 
Mag., March, May and June, 1871. 

Muhlenberg, General Peter, The Life 
of, by H. A. Muhlenberg. 

Muhlenberg, Peter, Gen., Career of, 
by Dr. Germann, in the Deutsch- 
Americanisches Magazin, Oct., 1886. 

Narragansett Church, Opdyke's His- 
tory of. 

Navesink, by Asher Taylor, in Proc. 
N. J. Hist. Soc, Vol. IX. 

Newburgh, N. Y., History of, by E. 
M. Ruttenber. 

Newbury, Mass., Coffin's History of. 

New Germantown, Local History of, 
by R. R. Honeyman, in the Somer- 
ville magazine, " Our Home," 1873. 

New Jersey, Archives of the N. J. 
Historical Society. 

New Jersey, Early Cities of, by Prof. 
Austin Scott, of Rutgers College, 
in Proc. N. J. Hist. Soc, 2nd Se- 
ries, Vol. IX. 

New Jersey,Elmer'8 Reminiscences of. 

New Jersey, Extracts from the Jour- 
nal Provincial Congress held at 
Trenton, May, June, August and 
September, 1775. 

New Jersey, Historical Collections by 
Barber & Howe. 

New Jersey Historical Society, Pro- 
ceedings of. 

New Jersey, History of, by J. Sy- 
pher, and £. A. Apgar. 

New Jersey, History of, by Thos. F. 
Gordon. 

New Jersey, History of, by Samuel 
Smith. 

New Jersey, History of Medicine in, 
Stephen Wickes, M. D. 

New Jersey, Journal of Votes and 
Proceedings, Committee of Safety, 
sitting in January, 177G ; also sit- 
ting of Provincial Congress at New 
Brunswick from January 31 to 
March 2, 1776. 

New Jersey, Journal of Votes and 



Proceedings, Convention of New 
Jersey, at Burlington, Trenton and 
New Brunswick, from June 10 to 
August 21, 1776. 

New Jersey, Lippincott's Cabinet 
Historv of. 

New Jersey, Memorial of the Cen- 
tennial of the Protestant Episcopal 
Church in. 

New Jersey, Presbvterian Churches 
in, by Rev. E. t. Hattield, D. D., 
in Dawson's Hist. Mag., for March, 
April and May, 1868. 

New Jersey, Taxes and Money in. 
Before the Revolution, by R. 
Wayne Parker, Proc. N. J. Hist. 
Society, 2nd Series, \o\. VII. 

New Netherlands, O'Calahan's His- 
tory of 

New Travels in the U. S. A., Per- 
formed in 1788, by J. P. Brissot de 
Warville. 

New York, History of the State of, 
by John R. Brodhead. 

New York, Documentary History of. 

New York Historical Soc. Collections. 

New York, History of the Ciiy of, 
by Martha J. Lamb. 

Olden Time Series, by Henry M. 
Brooks. 

Old Princeton, its battles, cannon and 
history. 

Old Time, Social Life of, in Eigh- 
teenth Century, by John Ashton. 

Old Times in the Colonies. 

Our Grandmother's Gowns, by Mrs. 
A. W. Hunt. 

Our Home, Somerville, N. J., Maga- 
zine edited by A. V. 1). Honeyman, 
Vol. I, 1873. 

Palatinate Colonists, Migrations of, 
by Edward Eggleston. 

Palatinate Colonists, Emigration to 
England in 1709, by Prof. Henry 
F. Homes. 

Pausch, Journal of Captain, Chief of 
the Hanau Artillery, Translated 
and annotated by William L. Stone. 

Peapack, N. J., History of the Re- 
formed Church at, by Rev. Henry 
P. Thompson. 

Pennsylvania, History ©f the Com- 
monwealth of, by William H. 
Egle, M. D. 

People of the United States, by John 
Bach McMaster. 

Perth Amboy, History of, by William 
A. Whitehead. 



718 



TiiK Stoky of an Old Farm. 



Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, An- 
nals of, in the Olden Time, by John 
F. Watson. 

Pluckaniin, One Hundred Years Ago, 
by A. W. McDowell, in the Somer- 
vilie magazine, "Our Home," 1873. 

Proprietors of East New Jersey, A 
Bill in the Chancery of New Jersey, 
at the suit of John, Earl of Stair, 
and others . . . against Benja- 
min Bond and some other Persons 
of Elizabethtown ... to which 
is added the Publications of the 
Council of Proprietors; and Mr. 
Nevill's Speeches concerning the 
Riots, etc., bv James Parker, N. 
Y., 1747. 

Proprietors East New Jersey, Ad- 
dress of Hon. Cortlandt Parker, at 
the bi-centennial celebration ot 
1884. 

Proprietors of East New Jersey, Ar- 
chives of Board of, at Perth Amboy. 

Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign 
Parts, An Historical Account of the 
Society for the, by D. Humphreys. 

Provincial Congresses, L. Q. C. Elmer, 
in Proc. N. J, Hist. See, 2nd Se- 
ries, Vol. I. 

Putnam, Israel, Life of, by William 
Cutler. 

Putnam, Israel, ^lemoirs of, by Hum- 
phrey. 

Earitan, The Dutch Settlers of, by 
TeunisG. Bergen, in theSomerville 
magazine, "Our Home," 1873. 

Raritan, The, and Its Early Holland 
Settlers, by Ralph Voorhees, in the 
Somerville magazine, "Our Home," 
1873. 

Readington Church, History of, by 
Rev. Henry P. Thompson. 

Recollections of an Aged Minister, 
by Rev. VV. W. Blauvelt. 

Reformed Church in America,Centen- 
uial of the Theological Seminary of, 
at New Brunswick. 

Reformed Dutch Church in America, 
Memorial of, by Rev. Edward Tan- 
jore Corwin, D. D. 

Revolution, American, A Biographi- 
cal Dictionary, or Remembrancer 
of the Departed Heroes, Sages, and 
Statesmen of. 

Revolution, American, Battles of, by 
Henry B. Carrington, Col. U. S. A. 

Revolution, American, Diary of 
Christopher Marshall. 



Revolution, American, Field Book of, 
by Benson J. Lossing. 

Revolution, American, History of, 
by David Ramsey. 

Revolution, American, History of 
New York during, by Thomas 
Jones. 

Revolution, American, Holme's An- 
nals of. 

Revolution, American, " Indian Cam- 
paign in 1779," by William S- 
Stryker. 

Revolution, American, Men and 
Times of, by Elkanah Watson. 

Revolution, American, New Jersey at 
outset of, Address by Charles D. 
Deshler before New Brunswick 
Hist. Club, Dec, 1875. 

Revolution, American, New Jersey 
Volunteers in, (Loyalists,) by Wil- 
liam S. Stryker. 

Revolution, American, "New Jersey 
Continental Line in the Virginia 
Campaign of 1781, by William S. 
Stryker. 

Revolution, American, Official Regis- 
ter of Officers and Men of New Jer- 
sey in, by Adjutant-General Wil- 
liam S. Stryker. 

Revolution, American, Personal Re- 
collections of, by Sydney Barclay. 

Revolution, American, Principles and 
Acts of, by H. Niles, 1822. 

Revolution, American, Records of, to- 
gether with general orders of Wash- 
ington, Lee, and Green, by W. T. 
R. Safiell. 

Revolution, American, The Block 
House at Toms River, by William 
S. Stryker. 

Revolution, American, The Book of 
Registry and Copy of Inventory of 
Damages done by the Enemy, and 
their Adherents, to the Inhabitants 
of Middlesex County, State Library. 

Revolution, American, "The Prince- 
ton Surprise,"by William S.Stryker. 

Revolution, American. The Pulpit of, 
by John Wingate Thornton. 

Revolution, American, Uniforms in, 
bv Thompson Wescott, in Dawson's 
Hist. Mag. 1860, p. 353; Pa. Ar- 
chives, Vol. VII, p. 293, and files 
of various newspapers, 1776, 1779. 

Revolution, American, Virginia Regi- 
ments in. Paper of Thomas R. 
Jones, read before Chicago Hist. 
Soc, 17 March, 1863. 



Bibliography. 



719 



Revolutionary Incidents, by Onder- 
donk. 

Revolutionary Times, by Edward 
Abbott. 

Kevolutionary War, Anecdotes of, by 
Alexander Garden. 

Revolutionary War, Military Journal 
during the, by James Thacher, M.D. 

Revolution, Chaplains and Clergv of, 
by J. T. Headley. 

Revolution, Diary of the, by Frank 
Moore. 

Revolution, Domestic History of, by 
Mrs. E. F. Ellet. 

Revolution, Presbyterian in the, by 
Breed. 

Revolution, Women of the, by Mrs. 
E. F. Ellet. 

Riedesel, Major-General, Memoirs, 
Letters and Journal of. Translated 
from the original of Max von Eel- 
king, by William L. Stone. 

Rodney, Captain Thomas, MSS Diary 
in possession of J. M. C. Rodney, 
Coolspring, Wilmington, Del. 

St. James Lutheran Church, Phil- 
lipsburg, N. J., Archives of. 

Schuyler, Cornelia, Marriage of, by 
Mrs. Martha J. Lamb, in Mag. 
Amer. Hist., Vol. XVIII. 

Shaw, Major, Samuel, Memoir of, by 
Jos. Quincy. 

Sloop, Travel, A Paper read by John 
Jay Smith, before N. J. Hist. Soc. 
in May, 1860. 

Smith, Autobiography of Gen.Samuel. 

Social Condition in the Colonies, by 
Edward Eggleston in Centurv Mag., 
June, 1884. 

Somerset County, N. J., Centennial 
History of, by Rev. Abraham Mess- 
ier, D. D. 

Somerset County, Historical Notes of, 
Rev. Abraham Messier, D. D. 

Somerset County. Penna., Husbands' 
Annals of the Early Settlement of. 

Steam Boats, First in New Jersey, a 
Paper read by John D. Ward be- 
fore the N. J. Hist. Soc, May, 1862. 

Steuben, William von. The Life of, 
by Frederich Kapp. 

Sterling, Lord, Life of, by Duer. 

Stirling, Lord. MSS papers in pos- 
session of Mrs. John K. Van Rens- 
selaer. 

Stories of the Rhine Border, by Erck- 
mann, Chatrian. 

Sullivan, Life of, by his grandson, 
Thomas C. Amory, Boston. 



Sussex and Warren County, N. J., 
History of, Edited by C. Snell. 

Temperance, Centennial Volume. 

Temperance, Pioneer, Footprints of. 

Temperance, One Hundred Years of. 

Tennent, Gilbert and William, Penn- 
sylvania Mag. of Hist, and Biog., 
Vol. X, p. 348. 

Tilghman, Lieut.-Col. Tench, Me- 
moir of, Joel Munsel, Albany. 

Tour in the United States of America, 
by Smyth. 

Trades and Plantations, MSS. Report 
of Board of, London. 

Travels in Middle Settlements in 
North America in 1749,by Burnaby. 

Travels in North America in 1748, 
1749, 1750, by Peter Kalm. 

Travels in North America, by The 
Marquis of Chastellux. 

Travels Through the Interior Parts 
of America, Lieut.Thomas Anburey, 
of Burgoyne's Army. 

Travels Through the United States of 
North America, by Due de la Roche- 
foucauld-Liancourt. 

Travels Through the States of North 
America, 1795-1797, by Isaac 
Weld, Jr. 

Trenton and Princeton, An Account 
of the Engagements at, by Mr. 
Hood, 3d Batt., Pa. Mag. of Hist, 
and Biog., Vol. X, No. 3. 

Trenton, Battle of, Penn. Mag. of 
Hist, and Biog., Vol. X, p. 203. 

Trenton, History of the Presbyterian 
Church, by Rev. John Hall, D. D. 

Trenton, One Hundred Years Ago, 
by William S. Stryker. 

Trumbull, Jonathan, Stuart's Life of. 

Union and Middlesex Counties, His- 
tory of, by W. Woodforcr Clayton. 

United States, History of, by George 
Bancroft. 

United States, History of, in Chro- 
nological Order, by Emery E.Childs. 

United States, Journal of a Journey 
through, in 1796, by Thomas Chap- 
man, Dawson's Hist. Mag., June, 
1869. 

United States of America, Hist, of 
the Rise, Progress and Establish- 
ment of the Independance of the, 
by William Gordon, D. D. 

United States, Pictorial History of, 
by Benson J. Lossing. 

Van Bergh, Dinah, Manuscript Jour- 
nal of, in Sage Library, New Bruns- 
wick, N. J. 



720 



The Story of an Old Farm. 



Van Bergh, Dinah, Manusmipt Sketch 
of Life of, by Rev. William Dem- 
arest, in possession of Miss Maria 
Deaiarest, Passaic, N. J. 

AValdo, Surgeon Albigence, Diary of, 
1778. 

AVashington and his Army During 
their March through New Jersey, 
by C. C. Havens. 

Washington and his (ienerals, bv J. 
T. Head ley. 

Washington and the Generals of the 
American Revolution, Philadel- 
phia, 1847. 

Washington. George, Facsimile of his 
accounts with U. S., June, 1775, to 
June, 1783. 

Washington, George, Life of, By Ed- 
ward Everett Hale. 

Washington, George, Life of, by 
Jared Sparks. 

Washington, George, Life of, by 
Washington Irving. 



Washington, George, Reception of, 
bv the People of New Jersey in 
178y, by William S. Stryker. 

Washington, George, Writings of, 
Jared Sparks. 

Washington's Order Books, Congres- 
sional Library. 

Washington's Servant Billy, by Mrs. 
Burton Harrison, in Century- Mag., 
Vol. XXXVIL 

White House, Local History of, Rev. 
William Bailey, in the Somerville 
magazine, "Our Home," 1873. 

Winningen, Germany, Arcliives of 
Lutheran Church at. 

Woodbridge, History of, by Rev. 
Jos. W. Dally. 

Woolman, John, A Journal of the 
Life, Gospel, Labors, Etc., of that 
Faithful Minister of Jesus Christ, 
late of Mount Holly, in the Prov- 
ince of New Jersey. 

Zion Lutheran Church, New Ger- 
mantown, N. J., Archives of. 




INDKX. 



ABEL ANDKEAS. Senr., 90 
Aberdeen, Earl of, 131 

Adams, John, letter to Gen. Lee, 339; protests 
against liquor selling-, 620 

Achter KoU, 183 

Addison, as a friend of Gov. Robt. Hunter, 44 

Agricultural implements of last century, 235 

Agriculture in last century, 234 

Ahanderbamock, 184 

Albigenses, 24 

Alcide, arrival of ship, 204 

Alexander, James. ICO, 186 

Alexander. JIarj', 93 

Alexander, William, 160; (see Lord Stirling) 

Allen. Bill, tavern-keeper, 3 

Allen, Judge George, 561 

Allen, Lt. Col. Isaac, 558 

Allen, Eobert and Joseph, 268, 269 

Allen, William, 267. 268 

Allied armie.s in N. J., 535 

Alteukirchen, 68 

American landscapes, 15 

American Society for the promotion of tem- 
perance, 623 

Amnesty ofl'ered by British, 327, 328 

Amsterdam, classis of, 252 

Amusements, 239, 429, 432 

Anburey, Lieut. Thomas, 357, 367 

Anchor-chains, when invented, 50 

Anderson, John, 173 

Anderson, Thomas, 562 

Andre, Major John, 527 

Andross, Gov. Edmund, 118 

Anhalt, Zerbest, troops from 354, 356 

Annapolis Convention, 551 

Anndriossen Lourens, 118, 191 

Anne, (^ueen, connection with German Emi- 
gration. 38, 40, 44; charters St. Jamwa' 
church, Piscataway, 198; oncourages slave 
trade, 220 

Annin, Samuel, 595 

Anspaeh, its political history, 68 

Anspach-Beyreuth, troops from, 351, 363, 3M, 

356 

Appelman, John, of ZionCh., 87; will of, 93; 
of St. Paul's Ch., 94; summoned by Council 
of safety, 430 

46 



Appelman, Tice, 4:50 

Apple-jack introduced iu X. J., 615 

Architecture, Colonial, the old stone house 
16, 153; Phila. dwellings in 173ii. 54; State- 
house and Christ church, Phila., 55, 56; 
liaritan dwellings in 1752, 175; Low Man- 
sion at Raritan Lanfling, IK); op de Mill- 
stone Church iu 1752, 181; Ross Hall, 189; 
Perth Amboy examples, 2 10, 211. First Bed- 
minster Ch. 265. 

Armasd's Light-corps, 367 

Arms and Accoutrements in Revolution, 332, 
333,335,341,405 

Armstrong, Major Richard, 503, 508 

Armstrong, Rev., 445 

Army, Burgoyne's, German contingent of ,357 ; 
Hesse Hanan Artillery, 364 ; at Cambridge, 
367; Lincoln at capture of, 411; surrender 
of, 449; artillery taken with, 454 

Army, Clinton's, retreat from Phila., 450; 
embarks at Sandy Hook, 451: march 
through Elizabeth in 1780, 521, 523; evacu- 
ates N. J , 525; provincial officers in. 557 

Army, French, anival of in 1780, .52U; in West- 
chester in 1781, 534; across X. J. to Virginia 
536-40: uniforms, 536; appearance of. 538 

Ai-my, Howe's arrives in N. Y. harbor in 

1776, 312; at battle of Long Island, 315; at 
Dobbs Ferry in 1776,317; first occupies N 
J., 319; in Piscataway, :«3 ; thieving and 
outrages of, 322, 321, 327, 365, 493: strength 
at Head of Elk, 368; strength at Assunpink, 
372; at Bound Brook in 1777, 408; in Somer- 
set in June, 1777, 416; evacuates New Jersey 
in 1777, 422; enters Virginia Capes in '77 
427; provincial officers in, 557 

Army, Lee's, 332, 334, 340, 343. 

Army, Washington's, strength of, at Cam- 
bridge, 291; strength of, in Aug., 1776, 313; 
at battle of Long Island, 315; ontei-« N, J, 
in 1776, 318: retreat through N. J., 319 to 
322; strength of in Doc., 1776, 322; entering 
Phila. in 1777, 3;«; strength 20 Dec, 1776, :M7; 
march from Tn^uton to Morristown in 

1777, 371: at Assunpink, 372; at battle of 
Princeton, 377; at Valley Forge, 374; march- 
ing down the Millstone. 381, 382; iu Plucka- 



722 



Index. 



min after Princeton, 383: at Morristown in 
1777, 390, 392: ditl'ereut posts in sprinK of 1777, 
■101; condition in Fol). 1777, 404; receives new- 
arms in April, 1777, 40.=); strength of. May, 
1777,411; at Middlebrook in 1777,415-422; at 
Quibbletown, 420: in a raiustorm, 423; 
marchinif down the Delaware in 1777, 427; 
effect of campaign, 448; at New Brunswick, 
July, 1778, <52: at Camp Middlebrook in 
1779, 454-492; condition in 1779. 457; at 
Morristown in 1780, 512-524; its extremity 
in 1780, 514 ; executions, 489, 520, 531 ; strength 
in May and June, 1780, 621 ; winter quarters 
of 1781, .528, mutinies of. 529, 531, 548; com- 
biHes \\ith French army in Westchester, 
534: across N. J. to Virginia, 535; at York- 
town. 540; disbanding of. 517 

Amold. Benedict, 368, 527, 532 

AiTosmith, Nicholas. 597 

Arrosmith. 'William, 611 

Arnold, Capt. .Jacob, 391 

Arthur, Kev. Thomas, 193 

Artillery, attempted capture of at King's 
Ferry, 454 

Artillery Brigade uniforms, 462 

Asgill, Capt., 543-6 

Ashdore, Henry, 366 

AsBunpink, battle of, 372, 395, 444, 557 

Astor, John Jacob, 367 

Atrocities of British during Revolution, 320, 
322-327. 3C5, 382, 495 

Auckersz, Jacobus. 191 

Augsburg Confession, 8e 

Augsburg, league of, 33 

Aunt Ann, 251 

Axtell. Charles F., 136 

Axtell, Daniel, buys the Winder tract, 130; 
buys portion of Peapaek patent. 133 

Axtell. Daniel, the regicide, 133, 133 

Axtell Family in N. .J.. 136 

Axtell, Samuel B., 136, 513 

Axtell tract, the, 134 

Axtell, William, 13.5, 161, 249 

Ayres, Enos, tavern, 592 

Ayres & Freoinan, 586 

Ayre.s, Jacob, Reuben, and Samuel, 324 

Ayres. John, 160 

Ayres, Mrs. Obadiah, murdered at Amboy, 
226 

Ayres, Obadiah, .\mhoy tavern of, 228 
AjTes, Obadiah, of Basking Ridge, 160 
Ayres, Obadiah, settles at Woodbridge, 106; 
John Pike's becpiest to, 109 

BACON, Dr. LEONARD, 618 
Bailey, James, Jinny and Peggy, 273 
Bailey John, 106 
Bailey, Sar»uel 478 
Balding, John, 187 
Baldwin. Rev. Burr, 440 
Baltimore, .581 
Baltimore, Lord, 105 
I'.ancroft, George, 2^21, 35.3, SSe, 373, 483 
r.aukof N. .1.. 581 
Jiaukof N. y..58l 
Banks, first in N. J., 581 



Banta, Jacob, 263 

Baptist Churches, Piscataway, 196, 197 

Barbarossa, 24 

Barker, Thomas, 112, 120 

Barber, Lt. Col. Francis, on Indian cam- 
paign, 491; at Yorktown, 532; record and 
death of, 533; celebrates Am. Independence. 
622. 

Barber and Howe, 119 

Barclay, John, 124, 178 

Barclaj-, Robert, 112; first gov. under props,, 
119. 

Barclay's Recollections of the Revol. W., 363 

Bard, Lt. Col. John, "558 

Barnes, Major John, 557 

Barnet. Surgeon Wm. M., 410 

]3arnett, Oliver, 602, 604 

Bamett Hall, 604, 688 

Barnhardt, Saml., of Zion Church, 82, 91 

Bartles. Mr., of Zion Church, 84 

Bartow, Revd. John. 141 

Bartow. Thomas, 141, 209 

Basking Ridge, first settled, 159; first church 
114, 160; Lord Stirling's house and park] 
307, 402, 493: General Lee at, 336. 342, 344; 
captured at, 342: General Greene at in 1777, 
401: society at in 1777,402; the wedding oj 
Lady Kitty Stirling, 493; decay of the Stir- 
ling mansion. 491: French army at, 538 

Basse, Gov Jeremiah, 120, 121 

Bayles, Capt. Piatt, 313 

Beach, Rev. Dr. Abraham, 330 

Beacon posts. 513 

Bedminstrt' R. D. Church, the present build- 
ing, 5: Sunday morning at in IStU), 6: build- 
ing the first ch., 263; appearance of, 265; 
first service in. 265; borrows money from 
John Van der Veer, 276; disciplining a mem- 
ber of, 43'2; Sunday morning at in 1778, 434; 
Simday booths at, 437 ; ref \ises a grave to 
Knox's child, 470; John Duryea's salary 
receipts. 593 

Bi'dminster township, line of, 4 ; Indians of, 
99; appearance of, in 1752, 156: condition in 
1763, 249: Com. of Observation and Inspec- 
tion, 286: Com. of Correspondence, 287; 
Lee's army in, 332, 335, 34:i; Muhlenburg 
marches through in 1777, 424; Lafayette's 
march through, in 1781, 533; paupere of, 596 
to 599. 
Bedminster village, stage arrives at. 8: store 
and school -house, 9 and 10: first house in. 
301: Lee's encampment night of his capture, 
343; Miihli-ul)urg marches through in 1777_ 
424: Lafayette s march through in 1781, 533; 
first tavern in, 665; Captain Fulkerson as 
tavern-keeper, 579, 
Beecher, Dr. Lyman, 618. 621 
Belcher, Gov, Jonathan, arrival of, 203; his 
IK>rtrait stolen, 495: names Nassau Hall at 
Princeton. 496 
Bellona, the steamboat, 588, 589 
Bellona Hall, 589 

Bendorf. description of, 23, 628; in 1715, 66; 
transferred to Anspach, 66, 68: political 
history of, 68: news of in 1749, 72; New 



Index. 



'23 



Jersey citizens from, 91: news of in 1760, 
246: news of in 1769, 278; furnishes Eng- 
land with troops, 353 

Benediction, an Indian's, 102 

Bennet, Adrian, and Angenietje, 189 

Bennett, Abraham. 187, 189 

BerKen Co., first inhabitants, 103, 106, 118: 
orig-in of name, 119: slavery statistics, 227 

Bergen, Georj^e I., 582 

Bergen, John B., 582 

Berg'en-op-Zoom, 119 

Berg-en Point, 502, 587 

Berber Caspar, 147, 148, 264 

Berfe'er, Charles and Catherine. 597 

Berkeley, Lord John, receives patent for N. 
J., 104 : sells his half of N. J., 110 

Bernard, Gov. Francis, 101, 204 

Bernards township first settled, 159; French 
army in, 537 

BernardsWUe, the night of Lee's capture, 
343; Pa. mutineers at, .530; Bullion's tavern 
at, 537 

Berry, Gideon, 597 

Bertaut, General, 141 

Bertholf, Rev. Guillaume. 252, 2!i3 

Biblioy-raphy, 714 

Beverajres of last century, 207, 237, 615 

Biddle, Col. Clement, 415 

Billinfrs. Edward, 110, 111, 113 

Billing-s, Captain, 529 

Billop, Christopher, 188, 198 x 

Billop's Toiut, 188, .503 

Bishop, .\bigail. 481 

Bishop, James, 585 

Black Bear Tavern, 544 

Blackheath. emigrants encamped on, 40 

Black Horse Tavern, 251 

Blair, John, 579 

Blair, Kobert, 478 

Blanchard, Claude, 537 

Blanchard, Lient., 543 

Blauvelt, Rf.v. "S\^ yv., 500 

Bleeding. 572 
^ Blodget, Major. 395 

Bloomfield, Joseph, 219, 577 

Bloomfield. Thomas. 108 and 109 

Blue Anchor Tavern, 60, 228 

Board of Proprietors of East N. J., 113, 121 

Boardman. Rev. F. W.,446 

Bond, Benjamin, 106 

Bonhani, Hezekiah, 197 

Bonham, Nicholas, 194, 199 

Bonhamtown. 199 

Bonnell, Benjamin, 478 

Boone, Gov Thomas, 204 

Boston, evacuated by British, 312 

Boston Port Bill. 283 

Boudinot, Elias, copper mine of, 193: at Bask- 
intr Ridge in 1777, 402: his dau^'hter'i mar- 
riag-e, 403: church connection, 443; at Prince- 
ton in 1783. 496 

Boudinot, Elisha. 219 

Bound Brook, pres, ch, at, 114, 171 : Johannes' 
first visit to, 166; in 1752, 168; ori»rin of 
name, 169: Jacob dc Groot's vault, 180: 
stag-es to, 230: (Tcn'l Lincoln at In '77, 401; 



Lincoln surprised at, 408; Steuben's quar- 
ters in 1779, 472: Simcoe at, 503, 505; allied 
armies at, 5t5; wagon traffic throUKh, 584 

Bourbonnais regt., 536 

Bontekoe, arrival of ship, 190 

Bows and Arrows, 3a3 

Boylan, Dr., 410 

Boylan, John, 163, 384, 581, B82 

Boylston, Dr. Zabdiel, 572 

Bradford, Andrew, his newspaper, t4 

Bradford, "William, att,-gen'l, 403 

Brain, James, 112 

Brandywine, Battle of, 333, 334, 428, 466, S24 

Branford, Conn., 109 

Brew-houses, 57, 176 

Bries, Hendrik. 185 

Bronson, E. Vantine, 253 

Brook, Rev. John, 417 

Brooklyn, condition of in 1776, 303 

Brooks, Rev. Mr., 198 

Brunswick, Duke of, troops from, 353, 356 

Brujih, Sarah, 583 

Bryant, Eleanor, 617 

Brj-zelius, Rev. Paul, of Zion Church, 82 

Buck's Co. Light Dragoons, 503, 505 

Buctd, Barnabas, 575 

Bullion, Capt. 163 

Bullion's Tavern. 410, 537 

Bunker Hill, battle of, 291, 477 

Bunn, Martin. 565 

Burd. John, 96. 161 

Burlington, asserablymeets at, 110; founding 
of, 110: a P. O. in 1752, 156 . 

Burnet, Gov. William, 201 

Burnet, Kobert. buys and sells Haywoods, N, 
J. interests. 121 

Burr, JIajor Aaron. 301, 400, 500 

Burr. Rev. Aaron, 499 

Burroughs, John. 275 

Buachurt-h, Rev., of Phila., 85 

Buskirk, Capt, Abraham, 5.58 

Buskirk, Capt. John, .5.58 

Buskirk, Capt. Lawrence, .558 

Buskirk, Lt. Col. Abraham, 568 ■ 

Butler, Col. of Pa. liue. 530 

CABO TS, VoA-ages of, 103 
Cade, Jack. 40 
Cadwalader. Col. T,anibert, 282. 350 
Ciesar's death sentence. 225 
Caldwell, IVIrs. James, death of, 522 
Caldwell, Rev. James, 431, 442,443, 622 
Calvin, Bartholomew S., 102 
Calvin, John, 442 
Camden, battle of, 407, 526, 532 
Campbell. Arcliibald. 171 
Campbell, Charles. 171 
Camiibcll. John, 171 
Campbell, Lewis. 478 
Campbell, Lord Xeal, as dep. gov.. 119, 126; 

his Raritan plantation. 170: his son John, 

219 
Camp-field, 458 
Carey. Thomas. .598 
Carey's museum, 535 
Carl Wilhelm Friidrich, Margrave of Ans- 

pach, 6H: his wickednesses, 69 



724 



Index. 



Carleton, Sir Guy, in 1776 retreats from Ti- 
conderofe'a, 341 ; breaks up Board of Loyal- 
ists, 546 

Carieton's legion, 558 

Cannen, Lewis, 190 

Carpenter, Sani'l. of Phila., 60 

Carriajre tax, 595 

Carroll. Charles, 296 

Carteret, Gov. I'hilip. his arrival and mar- 
riag-e in 1663, 105: buys portion of E'town 
grant, 106; buys land at Bound Brook, 169 

Cartaret, Lady Elizabeth, 105, 112 

Carteret, Sir Georg-e, receives patent for N. 
J., 104: death and mil of. 112 

Castner, Abraham, 430 

Castner, Elizabeth. 596 

Castner, Jacob, 430 

Castner, John, 173, 430 

Castner, Jlargaret, 164 

Cessation of Hostilities, 547 

Charles I, Axtell, at trial of, 133 

Charles II, patents N. J. to Duke of York, 
IM; return of, 133 

Charles VII. 358 

Charles Alexahder, Margrave of Anepach, 
352 

Charles Augustus of Saxe Weimar, 353 

Charleston, British repulsed at, 291 ; fall,jOf , 
in 1780, 521 

Chastellux, Marquis de, 365 

Chatham, N. J., 535, 541, 545 

Chatham, N. Y., 5J7 

Chatham, Earl of, 283 

Cheasman, William, 188 

Chint'arora, 183 

Christ Church, New Bnmswick, lottery for 
benefit of. 171 : g-rave of Dr. Alexander Ross. 
189; in 1752, 193: during Revolution, 330 

Christ aiurch, Phila., .57, 58, 370 

Christian Augustus, of Sweden, 540 

(;huroh of Knu'land in Revolution, 329 

Clandenin, Thomas, 267 

Clarke, Abraham, 443. 525 

Clarke. Benjamin, 177, 194 

Clarke, Mi-s. Thomas. 361 

Clarke. Rev, Jonas. 287 

Clayton's History of Union Co., 523 

Cle.aring N. J. lands, 2:54 

Clermont, the steamboat, 587 

Clinton, Genl. George, 5.35 

Clinton, Sir Henry, at Charleston, 291, 312; 
departure from N. Y. in 1782. 360; retreat, 
from Phila., 368; takes command, 449; 
opinion of Queen's Rangers. 502; at Charles- 
ton in 1780, 521 : reinforces Knyi)hausen in 
N. J., 524; sends agents to Pa. mutineers. 
530: deluded by Washington in 1781 534, 540 

Clover-Seed first used in Somerset, 235 

Coatcs Point, .M3 

Coblentz, 22 

Cochran, Dr., 516 

Cocks, William, 306 

Codrlngton, Thomas, 170 

Coens, Rev. Honriciis, 180 

Colchester, Lord, 569 

Coldstream goiards, the, 521 



Cold winter of 1780, 511 

Coleman Jacob, 6' 

Coleman, John, IttS 

Coles, George W., 76 

Colfax, Capt. William, 477 

Colle.ge of New Jersey, educates Shawriskhe- 
kung, 102; lottery for benefit of, 174; Jona- 
than Edwards' presidency, 214; Wither- 
spoon's presidency, 296; at battle of Prince- 
ton, 378, 495; the Commencement of 1779, 
495; diiring Revolution, 495; Gov. Belcher's 
library, 496; naming Nassau Hall, 496; 
founding of college, 497 ; removal to Prince- 
ton, 497; studies in last century, 500; confers 
degree on Nathan Strong, 619 

CoUier, SirCreorge, 315, 359 

Colonial currency, 134 

Colonial farm life, 233 

Colts Neck, 542 

Committee of Correspondence, first meeting 
of, 283; state convention of, 284; meeting 
of May, 1775, 287 

Committee of Observation and Inspection, 
of Bedminster, who comi>osed, and min- 
utes, 286, 289, 290, 291 

Committee of Safety, 292, 429 

Committee to depose Gov. Franklin, 300 

Concessions and agreements of the Lords 
prop'rs, 107 

Concessions and agreements of the 24 prop.. 
113 

Condit. Rev. Dr. Ira, 260. 262 

Confederation. The. 349 

Congress, continental meeting of first. 285; 
meeting of second, 294 

Congress (U. S.l after the Revolution, 5.50 

Connecticut Farm. Pres. Church destroyed 
at, 433, 523; fighting at, 522 

Constables Hook, 3 British troops on. 318 

Constitution of N. J. adopted. 298 

Constitution ratified l\v N. J.. 5,53 

Constitutional Convention, 551, ,552 

Constitutional Courant, 282 

Convention, .Anny. 357, 364, 367 

Convention of the State of N. J., 298 

Cook, Governor, 324 

Cook, William, 225 

Cooper, Benjamin. 574 

Cooiier, Robert, 223 

Cooper, Thomas, 112, 120 

Copley, the artist. 221 

Coriell, Jane, 365, 633 

Corle's Mills, 171 

Comburj-Lord first gov. under crown, 121 r 
opposed by Thomas Farmar. 188; character 
of, 201 

Cornwallis, Lord, pursues Washington's 
army across N. J., 319, 322; his expedition to 
capture Leo. 345: .Assunpink, 372; at battle 
of Princeton, 380; attacks Bound Brook, 
408; fights at Woodbridgi! and Plainfield, 
421 ; in Virginia in 1 781, 532, 5M ; surrender of, 
366, 367, 541 

Coryell's Terry. 424 

Cosby. Gov. William. 202 

Costumes in 18th century, in 17:«. 59; in 1752, 



Index. 



725 



194, 218: of a king's councillor, 217: in court, 
219; in farm families, 241 ; at Bedminster 
church in 1778. 4:b: on grand stand at 
Bound Brook Review, 484 

Council of Safety, 292, 429 

Council of the Proprs., 126 

Country merchants, 582, 596, 592 

Courten, Stephen, 190 

Courtland Parker, 104 

CowTens, battle of, 407, 532 

Cox, William, 188 

Coxe, William, 282 

Cradle, introduction of, 235 

Craig', Aaron, 430 

Crooked Billet Tavern and 'UTiarf , 50, 228 

Crose, Chi'istopher, 560 

Cross, Rev. John. 212 

Crow. Justice, 504 

Crusade, the third, 24 

Culloden, Battle of, 296 

Cummans, Christian, 560 

Cummins, William, 611 

Cunning^ham, Provost Marshall. 316, 317 

Currency depreciation, 98, 491, 494, 515, 519 

Cushetunk Mountain, 79 

Cussart. George, 170 

Custer. Gen. Georg-e A., 367 

Custiue, Count de, .540 

Custis. G. W. P.. 352 

D ALLEY, JOHN. 188, 229 
Dartmouth, Earl of, 220 

Davenport, Richard. 543 

Davison, Judg-e David, 560 

Day, Jacob, 439 

Dayton, Gen. Elias. 443, .521, 523, 545, 546, 622 

Dayton, Gen. Jonathan, 443, 525, 611 

Declaration of Independence, adoption of, 
295: when signed, 296; N. J. signers, 326, 525; 
anniversary celebrations of, 350, 453, 622 

Deed, first, of N. J. land, 118 

Deerfleld, Mass.. 617 

DeGroot, Jacob, 170, 173, 180 

DeGroot, John, 173 

DeHaas, General, 414 

DeHart, Major, 310 

DeKalb. General, 532 

Demarest, Rev. William, 259 

Demun, Peter, 158 

Demund, John, 597 

DePeyster. .\braham, 135 

Derr. John, 636 

Deshler, Chas. D., 325 

Despatch, ship, arrival of, 122 

De Stael, .Madame, 132 

Dick and Nance, 604-9 

Dickinson, Genl, Philemon, at battle of 
Princeton, 377; fight at Weston, 399: at 
Millstone in 1717,401 : follows Clinton's army 
in 1778. 450 

Dickinson. Rev. Jonathan, dau. of 288; effect 
of preaching. 431; first president of Prince- 
ton, 496 ; character and death of, 497-8-9 ; 
toddy at installation of, 618 

Diet of farm families. 2:17 

Dillon, Capt. and Major. .■>:« 

Dillon, William. 543 



Dipple, Lucas, 94 
Disaffection in 1776, 327-329 
Disbrow, Griffen, 141 
Division between 15. and.W. Jersey, Ul 
Dochlar, John C'onvad, 367 
Dodd, Lebbeus, 291 
Dogs as meai roasters, .54 
Donation visits, 239 
Dongan, Gov., 177, 187 

Donoi>. Count von. death of, 360; at Mount 
Holly, 363: at Assunpink, 372; at Bound 
Brook in 1777. 408 
Dover light infantry, 374, 381, 396 
Drake, George, 194, 196 
Drake, John, 195, 196 

Drinking habits, in Phila. in 1735, 57; Raritan. 
valley in 1752. 176: flip, 207 : tavern rates for 
in 174S. 228; various tipples, 237; at cessa- 
tion of hostilities, .547: tavern customs, 565; 
at trainings, 578: the habjt at present, 613; 
in Pagan times, 614; in the 18th century, 

614-623 
Drummond, Evan. 188 
Drummond, John. 112 
Drummond. Major Robert, 558 
Duchess, tract known as the, 131 
Duer, William, 467, 493, 495 
Dunham, .\zariah, 324 
Dunham, Azerial, 197 
Dunham, Benajah, 194, 197 
Dunham, Capt. Jehu, 592 
Dunham, David, of Bedminster, 290 
Dunham. David, of Piscataway, 324 
Dunham, I>'>i'Othy, Dinah, Jane, Marj', and 

Phtebe, 197 
Dunham. Edmund. 194, 197 
Dunham. Elisha. John, and Josiah, 324 
Dunham, Ephraim, 197 
> Dunham. John. 197 
^ Dunham. Jonathan, settles at Woodbridge, 

lOR, 197. 324 
Dunlap. William, 210. 218, 323. 392 
Dunn, Capt. Hugli, .325 
Dimn, Elizabeth, Esther, Hester' and 

Rebecca, 197 
Dunn, Hugh, settles in Piscataway. 107, 194; 

settles in Woodbridge, 108, 197 
Dunn, Hugh, Jr., 197 
Dimn. Jeremiah, Daniel and Justus 325 
Dunn, Major John. 309, 325 
Cunn, .lonatlian, 197 
Dunn. Lieut. Col., Micajah, 325 
Dunn, Micajah. 197 
Dunn. Samuel. Jr.. 197 
Duponceau. Capt. Peter S,. 473, 487, 537 
Duryoa. Rev. John. 693, 594 
Dutcli, early emigration to America. 27; in 

Raritan Valley in 1703. 169. 176. 191, 229; in 

New Brun.swick in 16ftl. 1H4; on the King's 

highwaj- in 174H, \m: in New Brunswick in 

1730, 18.5, 192: of Long Island, 229 
Dutch migration to N. J., 16«, 176, 183, 185. 229 
Dutch Reformed ("hurchos, Bedminster, 6; 

263-266. 431, 43.5, 437, 693; New Bnmswick. 

185, 190, 193, •J5i: Three Mile Run, 185, 252; 

Op do Millstone. 180. 54; Karitau, 251; 



726 



Index. 



North Branch. 251 : Six Mile Run. aw, "Sii ; 

Harlinpen. 180, 254: Sunday observances 

and cut-toms, 435. 437; SinKinKby note in, 

436: Dutch preachipff. 437 
Dutch Trail. 184 
Duval Claude. 40 

EASTERN BATTERY of STATE TROOPS, 
376 

East Jersey, set off from W. J.. Ill : sold to 24 
proprietors, 112: condition in 1682.114-117; 
g-overnment tfd. to Crou-n. 120 

Easton. Indian Conference at 101 

Eating' in last century, 237 

Eaton. Benjamin, 478 

Eddis, Edward, letters from .\merica. 149 

Edwards. Rev. Jonathan. 214. 253. 431, 499 

Eelking. Max von. 322. 358. 363. 366. 368 

Eg-bertsen, Hendrick, 191 

Eggleston. Edwai'd. his German emigration 
researches. 35. 46: Pluckamin. 165 

Ehrenbreitstein. 22 

Elizabethtown and Somerville Railroad. 2.30 

Ehzabethtown bill in chancery. 106. 130. 131. 
131, 141 

Elizabethtown. First Pres. Church of. 433. 
443. 496. 499, 516. 618 

Elizabethtown, founding of and origin of 
name. 105: first English settlement, 106; first 
assemlily meets at, 110: condition in 1682. 
117: lottery for benefit of. 175; in 1778. 303: 
First Pres. Church of. 433. 443, 496. 499. 516. 
618: surprised by British in 1779. 490: colleire 
of N. ,T. at. 497: religious condition in 1717. 
498: surprisedby Col. Buskirk. in 1780, 516: 
British march through in 1780. 521. 523 

Elizabethtown, St. John's Epis. Church, 444, 
497. 498 

Ellets' Domestic History. 361, 396 

Elmer. Lieut. Ebenezer. 623 

El Mora, 522 

Embury. Philip. 331 

Emigration. German, 26-49, 80, 186, 187, 216, i£i: 
Scotch, 27, 114, 126: Dutch. 27: Swedish, 27; 
French. 27. 3:}; Knirlish. 27 

Eotf. Christian. 163 

Eoff. Jacob, Jun'r, 430 

Eoff. Jacob, Sen'r, subscribes to St. Paul's 
Ch..93. 94; buys site of Pluckamin. 140, 162; 
his tavern, 164, 381: summoned by Council 
of Safety. 430 

Eoff. Sarah, 163 

Episcopacy in N. J.. 444, 497, 498 

Episcopalians in Rm-olution, 329. 331 

Equipage, at Bedminster Ch\irch. H: Phila.. 
in 1735. 61: in Amboy in 1752. 202; in New 
York in 1775, 281: tax on, 595. at Aaron 
Malick's funeral. 610 

Ernest. Duke of Saxe-Gotha, 3.53 

Erskine. Lord. 468 

Essex Co., first inhabitants. 103 

Establishment. First. N. J. Line, organiza- 
tion of. 307 : uniform and pay. 333 

Establishment. Second. N. J. Line, organiza- 
tion, uniform and pay, STui 

Eta-beta-pi Club. 456 

Eutaw Springs, battle of. 532, 541 



Evangelical Head-Church. Bendorf. 23: sup- 
plies ZionCh. New Germantown with mem- 
bei-s. 91, 628: its monument, 713 

Evil-doers, a parade of, 55 

Ewing, General. 350 

Executions in Continental .\rmy, 489, 620, 631 

FABRICS now oltsolete, 242 
Fac similes, 143. 582. 598, 602 

Faesch. Herr. 278 

Falrlie. Captain James. 487 

Fairs. 206 

Falkenberger. Christopher and Margaret. 75 

Falkirk, battle of. 296 

Farmar. Thomas. 187. 188 

Farmers, colonial, industries of. 239 

Farmers of last century. 234 

Fashion. N. J. mare. 420 

Fassbenders. of Bendorf. 91. 630. R32 

Fassbender. Jacob, of New Germantown. 91 

Father Matthew's Socy., 623 

Feather Bed Lane, 5 

Fein. Gottfried, of Zion Ch.. 87 

Fenner, John. Junr., 163, 383 

Fenton, John, 478 

Fenwicke. John. 110 

Fermoy. Gen. de 372 

Fersen, Count Jean Axel de, 640 

Field, Benjamin, 172 

Field Family. 176 

Field. Jeremiah. 172. 178 

Field. John, liis Raritan purchase in 1695. 
176. 

Field. Michael. 172 

Field. Richard I.. 178 

Fine John, of New Germantown, 88 

Fine. John and Philip. 636. 671 

First Delaware Kegt.. 375; First Establish- 
ment, N. J. Lino, 307: First Presb. Ch., of 
Elizabethtown, 4:C 443. 496. 499. 516. 618 

First R. D. Ch.. of Somerville. 252 

Fisher. George H.. .501 

Fisher. Hendrick. 287. 292. 293, 294 

Fisher, Isaac J.. 173 

Fiske, Prof. John. 365. 

Fitch. Daniel. 188 

Fitz-Randoli)h. 194. 196 

Flatbush. 229 

Flax and its uses, 242 

FlHmington,230 

Flip, 207 

Flowers of last century, 236 

Flying machines, 590 

Folkers, .John. 179 

Foil)-, The, 269 

Footstoves, 265 

Ford, Col. Jaooli. Jr., 395 

Ford, Jacob. Senr.. 396 

Ford Mansion. 395. 512 

Ford, the counti-rfciter. 575 

Fort Washington, fall of. 316 

Fort Lee. 318. 319 

Fossey. John. 430 

Foulke. .Joseph. 198 

Franklin. Benjamin, testifies in 1706 as to 
German Emigration. 49: dines at Crooked 
Billet Tavern. 50; his newspaper. 54: his 



Index. 



727 



description of Phila. constables, 55 ; supplies 
BraddocUs army with wa>f ons. 62 : voyage to 
Amboy, 230; protests ai^aint^t unjust taxa- 
tion, 281: in London in 1765, 282; Uis illetdti- 
mate son. 299; letters to Lee in '76. 333, 339: 
objects to inoculation, 573; temperance ap- 
peal, 620 

Pranklin. Gov. William, his arrival in N. J , 
205; address reg-arding' roads, 231; opposes 
the Revolution, 284, 297; character and 
record of, 298; is deposed from office, 300; as 
Pres. of Board of Loyalists, 545 

Tranklin tp. Tax List, 175, 190 

Franklin, William Temple, 299 

Frederick Augustus of Saxony, 353 

Frederick II. Elector Palatine. 41 

Frederick III, Elector Palatine, 41 

Frederick the Great, 34 ; in 1745, 67 ; example 
of on rulers, 68: father of, 69, 73: in 1747 
over-runs Holland, 257 ; condemns furnish- 
ing- England with soldiers, 353; militarj' 
opinions of, 373 

Frederick, William, the great elector, 32 

Freehold, 361, 365 

Freeman, Matthew, 585 

Free-willers, 149 

Frelinghuysen, Frederick, petitions against 
wearing gowns in court, 219; tribute to, 255, 
288; asst. sec'y to Prov'l Congress, 288; 

. Com. of Safety, 292; members of Prov'l and 
Contl. congresses of 1776, 297 ; his bro's-iu- 
law, 327; capt. of Eastern battery, 376; at 
battle of Princeton, 377 

Freliughtij'sen. Rev. .Johannes Henricus, 253 

Frelinghuysen, Eev. John. 254, 255, 258 

Frelinghuysen, Rev. Theodorus Jacobus, 253, 
431 

Frelinghuysen tavern, 501 

French alliance, news of, 449: first anniver- 
sary of, 466 

French army (see army French) 

French fleet, arrival at R. I. in 1780, 626; at 
Virginia Capes, 533, 534 

French Revolution, effect upon .\merica, 623 

French and EngUsh \\'ars, 569 

French, Philip, 185, 193 

Freusbnrg, 68 

Friedewald, 68 

Fruit of last century, 236 

Frurer, Ensign Carle, 368 

Fukeroth .^dam, of Zion Ch.. 91 

Fulkerson, Lieut. Wm., 577, 579 

Fulton. Robert, 587 

Funerals in the olden time, 6ij9, 617 

Furniture of last century, 18, 54, 241 

FuHsle, Jacob, 430 

GAIANT. M. de, 343 
Galloway, Samuel, 328, 454 
Gannett, Rehoboth, 194 
Garden, the old, IH 

Garretson. origin of name, 118, 191, 192 
Garrets, John F., sells land to Johannes, 74 
Garrish, Michael, 585 
Garrison, origin of name, 118, 191, 192 
Gaslor, Michael, 560 
Gaston, Joseph, 5<>1 



Gaston, Margaret, i>e4 

Gaston, Robert, 598; genealogy, 6:J5 

Gatenois regiment, 5.38 

Gates, Gen. Horatio, 341, 4S8, .'>?2 

Gayarre, History of Louisiana, 48 

Genealogj-. 627 

General Training, 578, 607 

Generals as shoemakers. 239 

Gentry in Colonial times, 216 

George I. chart^i-s Amboy Ferry, 122 

George II, hates music and poetry. 184; char- 
tei-s New Brunswick, 187; employs Hessians, 
358 

George III. in 1767 charters St. Paul's Ch., 94; 
obtains troops from Germany, 353 

Gerard, M.. betting on Mi-s. Jay's complex- 
ion. 477; reaches Caiup Middlebrook in 1779. 
48-2; at Bound Brook Review, 486; enter- 
tained by Steuben, 487 

German Emigration before 1735, 26; origrinal 
cause of, 28: the growth of, 33; present 
yearly exodus, 35; Germans now in Amer- 
ica, 35: in the Netherlands, on Massachu- 
setts Bay and the Delaware, 35; to Penn- 
sylvania, 36-49: to New Jersey, 37: to New- 
burg, 38; to London in 1709,39; to Ireland, 
41 : to Virginia and Carolina, 43-44 ; to New 
York with Governor Hunter in 1710, 44; to 
Louisiana in 1722, 48: Prof. Homes' paper 
on. 39; emigrants a religious people. 80; 
immigrants on the King's High\\ay, 136-187 ; 
tlirift. 216. 233 

German farmers, 233 

German Interior, a, 277 

German newspapers, first in America; 63 

Germans and Irish mutually repugnant, 238 

German thrift, 216. 233 

Germantovvn. battle of, 331, 369. 428, 466 

Germautown, Columbia Co., N. Y.. Palatines 
at. 46 

Germantown, Pa., founded, 36; Eiogr of 
Prus.sia Inn, 61: Johannes startt. for, 62; 
appearance in 1735, 63 

German Valley, S. J., settlement of. 37 

Germany, in the 18th Century, 28: Treaty of 
Westphalia, 31: other wars of the 17th 
century, 33; condition in 1745, 67; a patch- 
work of large and small governments, 28, 
68, 73; condition in 1749, 73 

Gerritsen, GeiTit. 118. 192 

Gerritsen. Hendrick, 191 

Gibbons, Thomas, ."iSS 

Gibbs, Barbara Margaret. 573 

Gibson, Elder William, 197 

Gibson William, 112 

Gilman, Charles, settles in Piscataway, 107, 
194 

Gloucester Landing. 319 

Gluck, John, .\mboy tavern of. '228 

Goelet, Captain. 2.53 

Goelet, Peter, 188 

Goethe, 353 

Gordon, Catherine. Duchess, of. 131, 132 

Gordon, Charles. 177 

Gordon, Major. 544. 546 



728 



Index. 



Gordon Patrick, dep. urov. of Pa., receives the 
the imniiKTants, 56; his coach. 61 

Gordon, Robert, a proprietor of East. N. J., 
112; proprietj' interests, 120 

Gordon, Thomas, 120. 124, 125 

Gordon, Thomas, of Trenton, 113 

Gordon. Thomas, F., 373 

Gordon's Hist, of N. J., 44 

Gottin^en, University of. 80 

Gouvemeur. Johanna. ISO 

Governor's Island, Palatines encamp on, 45 

Governors under the crown, 201 

Governors under the proprietors. 119-121 

Graduations, early college, SW 

Grafe. Cornet Auijust. 362 

Graft', Rev. William A., of Zion Ch., his arri- 
val in 1775, 86: appearance and character, 
89: death, 90: various spelling's of.name. 95: 
at Daniel Cooper's wedding-. 574; at Aarou 
Malick's funeral, 609 

Graffenried, Christopher de, 43 

Graham. Captain Sam'l, 406 

Graham. Ennis, 504 

Graliam, James, 203 

Grant, Gen'I, 323, 408 

Grasse, Count de, 534, 538 

Grave, fiist white man's in N. J., 103 

Gravelly Point, .'>42, 543 
'Graydon's Memoirs. 361 

Great Raritan Road, 167 

'Green, Rev. Ashbel, Sunday in his boyhood, 
438: as orderly serpreant, 445: his estimate 
of Washington, 469: as Princeton valedic- 
torian, 496; as a physician. .572 

Green, Rev. Jacob G., 438, 619 

Greene, Col. Chi-istopher, 360 

Greene, Gen. Nathanael, at Foit Lee in 1776. 
318: his opinion of tories, 323; letter in 1776 
as to Howe's ravatres, 324 : at battle of Tren- 
ton, .'M9; letter to John Adams in 1777, 368; 
at Pluclvamininl777, 385: at Jlorristown in 
1777, 'WS: record of, 401: iiuarters at Lord 
Stirling's in 1777, 402; opinion of Gov. Liv- 
inxton's daughters, 403; marches to Lin- 
coln's support in 1777, 409; reconnaisance 
in 1777, 410; lays out camp' Middlebrook, 
415; at the Van Veghten house in 1779, 458, 
4.19. 474; Washinirton's eulogj' of 4.59; de- 
scribes Jlr. and Mrs. Knox, 464; desciibes 
the Lott Family, 475; at Bound Brook 
Review, 485; orders inhabitants to fight 
snowdrifts, 514; at battle of Springfield, 
525; transferred to southern dept., 532; 
stafl'-officers 395. 475. .533 

Greene, Mrs., at the Van Veghten House, 459; 
at Washington's levees, 460; at Pluckamin 
Fete, 469; gives a dance at Middlebrook, 
474; her friendship for Lee, 479: her Georgia 
home and grave, 479; at Bound Brook 
Review, 484 ; at Morristowu in 1780, 516 

Greene, Prof. George W., 516 

Greenman, Rev. Nehemiah, 445 

Greenwich, Eng., German emigrants at 40 

Gressen, Univei-sity of, 86 

■Grillin, ship, arrival of, 110 

•■QTiggB, Benjamin, 179 



Groom, Samuel, 112 
Grunstadt, Bavaria. 86 , 

Guest. Capt. Moses, 506 
Gustavus, .\dolphus, 36 

HACKEXBERG, 66, 68 
Hackir, Ludwig. 439 

Hackettstown, origin of name, 203; sunday- 
schools introduced at, 439 

Hagamau. Adrian, Denyse, and Liurstia, 190 

Hagaman, Dohs, 187, 190 

Hager, Johannes 6eorg, his letter of 1745, 65; 
appearance of, 277, letter of 1769, 278 

Haines, Samuel, 575 

Halberstadt, emigration from, 37 

Hale, Edward Everett, 455 

Hale, Nathan, 317 

Hall, Dr. John, 618 

Hal lam's theatrical co., 218 

Halliday, Rev. Mr., 123, 198, 498 

Halsey, Rev. Jeremiah, 441 

Hamilton, Alexander at Hopewell Council, 
450; character and appearance, 475, 476; ap- 
pointed aide-de-camp, 476; at the Bound 
Brook Review, 486: meets Ehzabeth Schuy- 
ler, 517; aids in forming Constitution, 551-2; 
leniency towards loyalists, 558; passes loy- 
alist disfranchising act, 550 

Hamilton, Mrs. .\lexander, 402, 469, 517 

Hamilton, Andrew, gov. under props.. 119, 
120. 121, 120, 131 

Hamilton, John, 120, 202 

Hampshire, ship, arrival of, 82 

Hancock, John, extols N. J. militia, 311 

Hand, Col. Edward, 388 

Harcourt. Lt.-Col. Wm., 345 

Hardenbergh, Johannes, 255 

Hardenbergh, Jufvrouw, her friend Alche 
Van Doren, 250; marries John i'relinghuy- 
sen, 2.54. 258; Hardenbergh's woointf and 
marriage, 255. 259; character of. 256-260; 
journal of. 257: letters to Dr. Livingston, 
261: in Bedminster. 263: death of. 262 

Hardenbergh, Rev. Jacob R., birth and par- 
entage, 2.55 ; wooing and marriage. 256. 269 
installed pastor of Raritan Churches. 2.56 
removal to New Brunswick and death. 261 
member Prov'l Congress, 297; Revolution- 
ary record of. 431; at Bedminster Ch. in 
1778, 435; his lettei-s to Washington at 
Camp Middlebrook, 489; resigns from Bed- 
minster Ch., 594 

Hardy, Gov. Josiah. 204 

Harlingen. 181 

Harlingen Church, 180. 254 

Haipending. Peter, 501 

Harris, Benjamin, 331 

Harris, William, 172 

Harrison, John, 124. 125, 160 

Harrisonburg, Va.. Germans at, 43 

Hart, John. 294 

Hart. Thomas, 112 

Hartshorne, Hugh, 112 

Hartwick, Rev. John C. 81 

Harvesting in last century, 236 

Haslet, Col. WUliam. 375 

Hastier, John, 612 



Index. 



729 



Hatfield, Capt. John, 502 

Haverhill, Mass., 108 

Hawdon, Michael. 130 

Hawkins, Sii- John 222 

Hazelius, Dr. of Zlon Church, 82 

Hazen, Jud^e Thomas, 561 

Hazen, Col. and Genl. Moses, 535, 644. 

Headley, James T., 341 

Heard, Nathaniel, Col. and Brig-.-g-eu., 300. 309, 
313 

Heath, Daniel, 178 

Heath, General, William, 317 

Heerbrand, Capt., 150 

Heering-en, Col. von, 366 

Heidelberg-, 42 

Heister, Genl. de, at battle of L. I., 358, 359, 
360 

Henry and Francis ship, 126, 127, 189 

Henry, Capt. George, 374, 381 

Henry, Dr. Robert, 598 

Henry, Patrick, at first Continental Conja-ess, 
285; hunts with Muhlenburg- and Wash- 
ington, 413: leniency towards loyalists, 560 

Herbert, John, 480 

Herbert's Island, 171 

Herkimer Genl., Ruttenburg-h's eulogy- of, 38 

Hesae-Hanau, troops from, 353 

Hesse-Cassel, troops from, 353 

Hesse, village oi 190 

Hessians, 8000 i-each N. Y. in 1776, 312, in Pis- 
cataway 325: at Trenton and Borden - 
town, 348: captured at Trenton, 349: just a 
little in their favor, 352; troops in America, 
353; Schiller's testimony, 355: uniforms of 
358, 417 : courtesy of officers, 360, 362 ; at Read- 
inf.', Pa., in 1778, 361; a-ood liehavior of 
362, 365: at Yorktown capitulation, 365: at 
battle of L. I., 365: desertions, 366-369: at 
Bound Brook in 1777, 408 

Hetfield, Stephen, 478 

Hej-wood. John, 112, 120, 121 

Hillsboroug-h, 166 

Hillyer, Rev. Asa, 445 

Himroth, Simon Ludewig-,(Himrod) 277-279, 656 

Hindersheidt, Pastor, of Zion Church, 91 

Hitchcock, Col. Daniel, 395 

Hixson, Joseph, .560 

Hoag-land, Christopher, 381 

Hoag-land, Wm., 97, 1.58, 161 

Hog-back, The, 268 

Hohenfriedberg-, liattle of, 67 

Holcomb, Samuel, 5&5 

Homes, Prof. H. X. , paper of, on Gei-man emi- 
gration, 39, 41: as to Hudson River Pala- 
tines, 46 

Hope Express Co., 230 

Hopewell Council of AA'ar, 450 

Hopp. Dr. Ernest Otto, 150, l!52 

Hombaker, Joseph, of Zion Church, 82-91. 

Horse-racing-, 429 

Horticulture in last centurj', 236 

Houston, AVilliam C, 562 

Howard, Dr. Cliarles A., 189 

Howe, Gen. Sir William, character of, 322; 
von Eelklng's estimate of, 322; departure of, 
449 (see .\rmy, Howe's) 
47 



Howe, Lord, confers with Franklin, .\dam8 
and Rutleg-e, 188; offers amnesty. S-is 

Howell, Richard, 219, 577 

Huddy, Capt. Joshua, 502, 542, 544 

Hude, Adam, 189 

Hude, James. 187, 189 

Hudson Co , first inhabitants, 103 

Hudson Hendrick at Newburg-, in 1609. 38; 
lands in Monmouth Co., 102 

Hughes, Thomas, 562 

Hull, Benjamin, 194, 195 

Hull, Hopewell, settles in Piacataway, 107, 194- 
196 

Hull's Tavern, 193, 194, 195 

Hunt, Al)raham, :«9, 618 

Hunt, John, 58-j 

Hunt, Marmadnko, 331 

Hunt, Stephen, buys mills on Peapack 
Brook, 269: member of Com. of Oliserva- 
tion and Inspection, 286, 289, 290: Col. 1st 
Somerset Batt.. 308; Col. Provisional N. J. 
Regt., 313 

Hunter, Governor Robt. in N. Y , 38; charac- 
ter of, 44 ; his residence at Perth Amboj-, 45, 
201; brings fleet of German emigrants to 
N. Y., 45; condemns Mr. Halliday, 123 

Hutchinson, Capt. William, 561 

Hutchinson, Duncan, 187 

INDENTED servants, 149 
India King Tavern, Phila., 57 

Indians, Massacre of Germans by Tuscaroros, 
44, 99; in State House Square, Phila., 56 
Delawai-es, or Lenni Lenape, 57, 98; Six 
Nations of N. Y., 57, 98; Walking- Treaty, 
57; Narraticongs, 98: Karitan Indians, 99; 
traces of, on Old Farm, 100; Easton confei- 
cnce, 101; New Jei-sey's fair treatment of, 
101; On the Raritau in 1650, 169: Paths 
across N. J., 108, 125, 182, 183; at Amboy in 
175'A 215; Sullivan's campaign against, in 
1779, 490; Captain Yoorhees in campaign, 
407 

Indian paths, from E'town to Delaware, 108, 
182; Peapack path, 125: Minisink path, 183; 
Somerset path, 183; through Burlington 
Co., 185 

Industries of farm families, 239 

Inglis, Charles, 454 

Idians Ferry, 181, 186 

Inians, John, 184 

Inoculation, 573 

Incpiisition against loyalists, 660 

Insley, Lt. Christopher, 558 

Installation balls, 446 

Ireland, Palatinates settled in, 41 

Irish and Germans mutualiy repugnant, 238 

Irvine, General, 515, 628 

Irving, Washington, 44 

T ACOBS, ANTHONY I., 290 
J Janse, Aiike, 191 
Jansen, Michael, 118 
Ja<]ues, Henry, 108 
Jay, John, IM 
Jay, Mrs. John, 401, 477 
Jefferson, Thomas, introduces plough shares, 



730 



Index. 



235: Declaration of Independence, 295; 
firesidency of, 5!»5 

Jennj-, ship, 602 

Jersey Blues, 333 

Jersey City, first settlement, 118: in 1776, 303 

Jersey, Island of 104, 105 

Jersey Line, First and second establisments 
of. 307, 33:^, uniforms of 333: at Brandy^'ine 
and Germantown, 334: uniforms in 1779, 
463; surprised at ElizaVjethtown in 1779, 
490: starts on Sullivan's Indian campaign, 
491: station in 1780, .521; at Connecticut 
Farms and Springlield, .')23: march to Vir- 
ginia, 535: at Chatham in 1782. 541 

Jersey, oriKin of name, 105 

Jinny Hole, the, 273 

Johan Frederick, Marffrave of Anspach, 68 

Joh. Georife I.. Duke of Sachsen-Eisenach, 68 

Johnes, Rev. Timothy, 394, 432 

Johnson, Alfred, 304 

Johnson, Coart, .560 

John^on, David. 560 

Johnson, Dr. Sam, 331 

Johnson, Thomas P.. 599 

Johnston, Col. Philip. 313, 314 

Johnston, Gen. Jeremiah, 314 

Johnstone. Andrew, 120, 209 

Johnstone, Dr. Lewis, 140 

Johnstone, Euphemia. 137 

Johnstone, John, Indian purchase, 100: com- 
plains of mo8(iuitos, 114; propriety inter- 
ests, 120: buys Peapack patent, 126, 137 
marriage of 127 : Amlwy residence, 127, 210 
dauL'hters of 137: death of and will, 139 
sentences a neg-ro, 225 

Johnstone, Mary, 140 

Jones, Jud^e. 3M. 366. 441 

KALM, Prof. Peter, his account of the Hud- 
son River Palatines, 47: His lodjdng- 
expenses in Phila.. 57; arrival and fellow- 

■ passengers of. 150, describes New Bruns- 
wick, 186: opinion of the Dutch.192: describes 
Trenton in 1748, 229: tells of a N. J. weddiUK, 
244; at Princeton, 499: mentions women 
doctors, 567 (see errata) 

Kapp, Frederick, 356 

Keau, John, 302 

Keith. GeorKe, 178 

Kellcy, Josi^ph, 430 

Kelsey, Enos, 292 

Kemper, Mr. and Mrs., 538 

Kennedy, Capt. W . 600 

Kennedy. Rev. Samuel, 159, 402 

Kent, ship, arrival of, 110 

Kettledrums at Pluckamin Camp, 465 

Kej-port, 183 

Kiohiner, Dr.,456 

Kieft, Gov. William, 177 

Killing' frolics. 239 

Kill von Kull, 183 

Kimball Hill, 512-526, 528 

Kimball, Richard, 615 

KinK, Charles, 181 

KinK. C. L., 181 

Kinif, David, 93, 94 

Kintr Geori^e, arrival of ship, 2.53 



Kin(f, Marcus, 276 

KinK, Marcus of Zion Ch., 87, 93 

KinK, Maria and Ma^dalena, 276 

Kind's Councillor, the, at Amboy, 217 

King's Highway, 18.5, 186, 193 

King-sland, Isaac, 118 

King's Rangers, 501 

King St., (New Germantown) 78 

Kingston, 321 

Kippold, Preceptor, 70 

Kirbcrger, Andreas, 66, 71, 632 

Kirbei-ger, Anton, curator, 66, 71; a letter 
from, 72; death of, 278, 633 

Kirberger, Ehrenreich, Aaron Malick's god" 
father, 71 , 630 

Kirberger, Gottfried, Burgomaster of Ben- 
dorf, 25; his two wives and children, 71, 631, 
632 

Kirberger, Joh. Geo., 246 

Kirberger, Joh. Heinrich, Burgomaster of 
Hochsteubach. 66, 71 ; letter of 1760, 246 

Kirbcrger, Joh. Wilhelm, 71, 632 

Kirberger, Veronica Gerdrutta, marries Otto, 
65: her death, 66, 70: her birth, 71 

Klein, Christian, of Bendorf, 91, 683 

Kleinsmith, Ensign, 368 

Klincken, Arents, 36 

Kline, Godfrey, of Hunterdon Co., 91, 630,683 

Kline, Jacob, marries Johannes' daughter 
Veronica Gerdrutta, 75; his home and tan- 
nery in 1750, 75: Warden of Zion Church, 
New Germantown, 82, 91; birth of, 95; 
granddaughter, Mary, 178; first tastes 
sugar, 238; old age crowds upon, 5>54; sells a 
slave to Aaron Malick, 603; buys slave-boy 
Joe, 611; genealog}-, 631, 632, 648 

Kline, John, of Readington, 76 

Kline, John William. 95 

Kline. Mai-y, 178 

Klines, Mills, 164 

Knebel, Gottfried, 66, 70 

Knox, General Henry, at Pheenix tavern, 290; 
at .\s8unpink, 372; at battle of Princeton, 
378; Aaron Malick's description of 385; 
marching from Trenton to MorTisto\\Ti, 389; 
his artillery train in 1779, 454; orders a new 
uniform, 462: at Pluckamin in 1779, 463; 
deathof childof, 470; at Boimd Brook Re- 
view, 485 

Knox, Mrs. Henry, reaches Mori-istown camp 
in 1777. 395; at Pluckamin in 1779, 464; at 
the French alliance fete, 467: death of her 
7 children, 470; character and api>earance, 
464; at Bound Brook Review, 484; at Mor- 
ristowu in 1780, 516 

Knox, John, 442 

Knox, Peter, 465 

Knox, William, 462 

Knyphaiisen, Genl. von, character of, 359; 
hangs a deserter, 368; enters N. J. in 1780, 
521, 524 

Kockerthal, Joshua, his colony, 38, 39 
Kohl, a German traveller, 41 
Krafl, von Charles, Philip, 364, 365, 368 
Kimtz, Rev., of Phila., 85 
Kurtz, Rev., of Zion Church, 84 



Index. 



731 



LAFAYETTE, Genl.. 532, 533, 541 
Laferty House, the, 4 

Lanibertson, Lawrence, 560 

Lambertville, 230 

Lamb's Artillerj' Regt., 377 

Lamb. Mrs. Martha J., Hist, of City of N. Y., 
135,360 

Lamington, Pres. Ch., Founding of, 114, 158; 
SynotI meets at, in 1778, 434; during the 
Eevolution, 441: communion Sunday at, 
445; Betty McCoy 446; minister treats 
elders, 447 

Lancaster, Pa., 544 

Landar, Labau, 478 

Lane, Cornelius, 263 

Lane, Matthias, 286 

Lane, Matthew, 163. 286, 383 

Lane, origin of name, 192 

Lanen, Matthys Janz Van Pelt, 192 

Langendorf , 36 

Langstaff, John, 194 

La Monte, George, 170 

LaTourette, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius W., 472 

LaTrappe, Pa., 81 

Laurens, Col. John, 452 

Laurens, Henry, 467 

Lauzun-Biron, Due de, 539 

Lauzun's legion, 5.39 

Lawrence, Capt. Wm., 105 

Lawrence, Elisha, 557 

Lawrence, Elizabeth, 105 

Lawrence, Thos., Mayor of Phila., 1735, 52 

Lawrie, Gawen, buys share in N. J., 110, 112; 
as deputy gov., 119; calls Benjamin Clarke 
a "divil," 178 

Laws, odd colonial, 208 

Lawyer's bill,599 

Lead, a precious metal, 291 

Lee, Captain Joseph, 558 

Lee, David, 188 

Lee, Genl. Charles, his burial, 60; at New- 
castle in 1776, 318; ordered to join main 
army, 319, 321 ; his army encamps on Peter 
Melick's land, 332, 335, 343; at Basking 
Ridge, 336, 341 ; character and record, 337 ; 
marches to N. Y. in 1776, 339; at Charleston, 
340; captured by the British, 342, 344; will 
of, 346; court-martial of, 453 

Lee, Henry, (Light-horse Harrj',) appearance 
and record, 479; quarters of, at Camp Mid- 
dlebrook, 480; at Bound Brook Review, 485; 
attacks Powles Hook, 492; his graduation, 
500; opinion of Suucoe, 504; at battle of 
Springfield, 525 

Lee, Richard Henry, 294 

Lee, Robert E., 485 

Lee, William, 488 

Lee's Legion, uniform of, 463 

Leume, Johann Gottfried, 356 

Lenni-Lenape, or Delaware Indians, 98, 99 

Lenni Wihittuck, Indian name for Delaware 
98 

Leslie, Capt. William, record, death and 
burial of .378, 385 

Leslie, Genl., 372, 380 

Leslie George, as Willock's heir, 137; buys 



Bedminster land, 138; limits of his tract, 
140: sells the old farm to Johannes Moelich, 
96,141 

Leslie's brook, 75 

Leslie's ridge, 75, 76 

Lesser Cross Roads, appearance of in I860, 1, 8; 
store and school house, 9-10; first house 
in, 304; Lee's army at 334 

Letters, their subtle charm, 70 

Letters from Bendorf, Preceptor Hager, 68, 
27H; Anton Kirberger, 72; H. Kirberger, 246 

Leven, Earl of, 378, 379, 386, 387 

Lexington, battle of, 287 

Leydt, Rev. John, 193, 250, 254 

Liberty Hall, 302, 403, 404 

Life Guard. Washington's, its flag, 352, uni- 
form of, 463; appearances and uses, 478 

Lillie, Captain, 464-465 

Lime, introduction of, 234-235 

Lincoln, Genl. Benjamin, quarters of at 
Bound Brook in 1777, 401; surprised by 
CornwalUs, 408; character and record of, 
411; at Charleston in 1780, 521; march to 
Virginia, 535 

Linn, James, 93, 219, 297. 469 

Lippencott, Capt. Richard, 502,544, 545 

Literature, value of in 17th century, 109 

Little Egg Harbor Inlet, 111 

Livingston, Betsy, 404, 477, 517 

Livingston, Capt., 475 

Livingston, John, 404 

Livingston, John R., 587 

Livingston, Kitty, 404, 477,517 

Livingston Manor Patent, 46 

Livingston, Philip, 617 

Livingston, Rev. Dr. John H., 261, 500 

Livingston, Robert, 255 

Livingston, Robt. James, 587 

Livingston, Robt. R., .587 

Livingston, Sarah, marries .John Jay, 404; at 
Camp Middlebrook in 1779, 477 

Livingston, Susan, plants a tree at Liberty 
Hall, 302; at the Stirling mansion in 1777, 
403: her cleverness and humor, 404; at Mor- 
ristown review, 517 

Living-ston, William, committee to depose 
Gov. Franklin, 300; appointed Gov. of N. J., 
301; record and residence of, 302; testifies aa 
to British atrocities in 1776, 323; at Parsip- 
pany in 1777, 403; Family of, 403; church 
connections, 443; correspondence with 
Washington in 1779,457; Simcoe tries to cap- 
ture, 503; at Morristown review, 517; Max- 
well's letter to, in 1780, 623; aids in forming: 
constitution, 551,5.52; pardons 17 loyalists, 
S66 

Lowantica Valley, 392 

Logan, William, 158 

Log-house, building the, 145 

London, arrival of German emigrants in 1709 
39 

Long Ferry, 137, 206 

Long Ferrj' Tavern, 206 

Longfitad, Henry, 188 

Long Island, battle of , 314,315, 357, :K)K, 361, 
375, 466 



732 



Index. 



Long Island, minute men on, and political 
aspect of, in UK. 310; Washington's retreat 
from, 317 

Lords-Proprietors, 107 

Xossburif, Col., von, 366 

Losainif, Benson J., :«*,469, 473 

Lott, Abraham, 475 

Lott, Cornelia, 475 

Lott, Cornelius, 506 

Lotteries, 171, 173, 590 

Lowell, Edward K., 353, 357 

Louisiana, Gayarre's history of, 48 

Louis XIV. in Germany and Holland, 33; de- 
stroys Heidelberff, 42 

Louis XV. intrignies with N. J. Indians, 101; 
in 1747 over-runs Holland, 257 

Louis XVI., i:«, 54.1 

Love Grove, 205 

Lovelace, Lord, gov. under crown, 38, 201; lo- 
cates Kockerthal's colony, 38; his death, 44 

Lowe, Cornelius, Jr., 180, 585 

Lowrance, Elisha, 580 

Loyalists, or tories, their oppresions in 1776. 
323; treatment of, 505, 554-.562 

Lucas Nicholas, 110, 111 

Lucas Koelef, 185 

Ludlow, Henry, 161 

Ludovic v.. Elector Palatine, 41 

Ludwick, Christopher, 369 

Luther, Martin, 442 

Luzerne, Chevalier de la, 517 

Lyon, William, 381 

M.VCKEN, JOSEPH, 560 ' 
Madison, N. J., Sunday-school, in 440 

Madison, James, 551, 5,52 

Map. of Am. HistoiT, 360 

Magna Charta, 24 

Mahew, the widow, .'lOe 

Mails, in 1752, 156; in 1790, 303 

Malick, Aaron (Moelich JLhrenreich), birth of, 
25; Warden of Zion Ch., 8.5, 87; Warden 
of St. Paul's Ch., 93; signature of, 94; 
niarrifs Charlotte Miller. 243; succeeds 
Johannes on farm. 248; household in 
1775, 276; his bond to John Van der Veer, 
276; member of Com. of Observation 
and Inspection, 286; entertains General 
Sullivan, 336; arrest and release of, 344; 
visits the army of Pluckamin, 384 ; enter- 
taims Washington, 391 ; various Church con- 
nections, 440; survey of household in 1780, 
511 ; letter to William and John Melick, of 
Canada, 554 : buys Peter's Bedminster Farm, 
665; sells Bedminster Tavern, 579; his sheep 
contract, 580; various bills of, 580, 581, 584, 
592; pays carriage tax, 595; overseer of the 
I>oor, 596-9; buys slaves, 602-4; death of, 
608; fimoral of, 609; genealogj-, 632, 633 

Malick, .\ndrew (Andreas MoeUch) 25; mar- 
riage of, 245; settles in Warren Co., 306; 
founds St. James' Ch., 305; commissioned a 
captain, 305; tombstone of, 306; jiiror on in- 
quisition against Wm. Melick, 560; gene- 
alogj', 632. 63C 

Malick, Catherine (wife of Andrew), 306 



Malick, Charlotte (Miller), 87, 213, 573, 603, 606 

Malick, John (son of Aaron), his Revolution- 
ary rec»rd, 306; marches to Long Island, 
310; in provl. X. J, Eeg., 313; captured at 
Battle of Long Island, 314 ; in N. Y. Sugar 
house, ,316; maiTiage of, 565; keeps Bedmin- 
ster tavern, 565; Dr. McKiasack's bill tOg 
566; removes to Schoharie Co., K. T., 679; 
genealogj-, 633, 638 

Manning, James, 195 

Manning. Jeffrey, 194 

Manuscript, pleasures derived from old, 142 

Maria Theresa, 67 

Marie .Antoinette, .540 

Marshall, Thomas, 188 

Mai'ston Moor, battle of, 379 

Martin, John, settles in Piscataway, 107, 194 

Martin, William, 478 

Marvel, .\ndrew, 282 

Marj-, ()ueen of Scots, 442 

Mary, ship, arrival of, 150 

Mason. Rev. John, 441 

Massachusetts bank, 582 

Mather, Dewitt C. 457 

Mather, Cotton, 572 

Matthews, B. B., 504 

Matthews, Genl., 408, 521 

Mawhood, Lt.-Col., 328, 372, 378 

Maxwtll, AVm., Col., 1st .Sussex Regt., 305; at 
Braudywino and Germantown, 331; cap 
tures Hessians at E'town, 369, 399; his com- 
mand in 1777, 405; record of, 405; follows 
Clinton's army in 1778, 450; surprised at 
Elizabethtown in 1779, 490; at Connecticut 
Farms and Springfield, 523, 525 

ISIayflowei-, the sloop, 587 

McCoy, Betty, 446 

McCoy, John F., 174 

McCrea, Jennie, 158 

McCrea, Revd. James, 158, 171 

McCuUough, Benjamin, 560 

McDaniels, Col. William, 164 

McDonald, Maj. William, 166, 327 

McDowell, Dr. .A. W., 567 

McDowell, Ephraim, settles on Astell tract 
135, 162: at Lamington Ch , 158 

McDowell, Rev. John, 162, 611 

McDowell, Rev. WilUam, 162 

McKe,an, Thomas, 541 

McKidder, Calvin, 608 

McKissack, Dr. William, 566 

McKnight, Rev. Charles, 445 

McMaster, John Bach, 233, 572 

McWhorter, Rev. Alex. 431, 445 

Meade, Dr. 569 

Meat roasters, dogs as, 54 

Medicine, .566-572 

Meehan, Mrs. Jane, 455 

Meg Merilles, Bodminster's, 274 

Mehelm, John, Vice-Pres. Provl. Congress, 
293; member Com. Safety. 294, 431; Commit- 
tee to depose Gov. Frankhn, 300 

Meizner, Conrad, 94 

Meldrum, John, 600 

Melick, Anthony, .Anton or Tunis, of Hunter- 
don, his birth, 80 ; Father Muhlenberg'B 



Index. 



733 



mention of, 85; member of Zion church, 
87; entertains a Methodist and is discip- 
lined, 88; g-enealogy, 682 

Melick, Cathrine idau. of Aaron), 245, 56i, 631. 

Melick, Catherine (dau. of Peter), 3(M ; mar- 

i Iriage and death, 336; statement as to Lee's 

I "captnre, 336 ; Renealogy, 337, 637 

Melick, Catherine (of Zion Ch.,) 87 ; becomes a 
Methodist, 88; her habits of prayer, 88; 
genealoK'y, 682 

Melick, Christian, 87 

Melick, Daniel, of Bedminster (son of Aaron), 

tt executor of John Appelman, 93; birth of, 245, 
564; as a militia Captain, 579; old store bills 
of, 583, 584 , 592 ; as overseer of the poor,696-599 ; 
goes to Georgia, 600-602; at Aaron's funeral, 
609; buys Dick and Nance, 611; genealogy^ 
635, 639 

Melick, David (of Hunterdon Co.), 79; 629, 696 

Melick, Eleonora, SI 

Melick. Elizabeth (dau. of Aaron), birth and 
death of, 276 

Melick, Godfrey, emigrates with Johannes, 
25; baptism, 71; settles in 'SVarren County, 
N. J., 74; his marriage, 75; genealogy, 630; 
670 

Melick Hill, view from, 14 

Melick, Jacob D., of Pa., 678 

Melick, Jacob, son of Godfrey, 554 

Melick, John (son of Daniel), 251, 640 

Melick, John (son of Godfrey), 554, 555, 671, 674 

Melick, Jonas (of Hunterdon Co.), 79. 87, 629 

Melick, Margaret (dau. of Aaron), 276, 511, 564 

Melick, Maria (dau. of Aaron), birth of. 276, 
511, 635 

Melick, Peter (son of Johannes Moelioh) ves- 
trj-man of St. Paul's, 93; birth of, 95; mar- 
riage, 276 ; home and inheritance of, 304; 
takes British oath, 328, 399; sumuioued by 
council of safety, 430; sells his Bedminster 
farm to Aaron, 564; genealogy, 6.33, 637 

Melick, Peter (of Columbia Co., Pa.), geneal- 
ogy, 629, 703 

Melick, Philip, (son of Johannes Moelich) 
birth of, 95; marriage of, 276; summoned by 
council of safety, 430; genealogy, 633, 636 

Melick, William, loyalist, 554, 555, 560, 670, 672 

Mellick, 927, various spellings of name, 94, 627 

Melsheimer, Chaplain Carl, 369 

Melyen, Rev. Samuel, 618 

Mendham, original settlers at, 159 ; origin of 

name, 165; Quakers of, 332 
Mendham Pres. Church, founding of, 159; 

singing liy note introduced, 436 
Menge, Ernest, 560 
Mercer, Fort, 360 

Mercer, Genl, Hugh, 319, 375. 377, 378, 387 
Mercury, ship, voyage and arrival of, at 

Phila., .=10 
Meserau, John, 590 

Messier, Dr. Abraham, 100, 134, 169, 252. 253, 
256, 505, 508. 510 

Methodists, first in Hunterdon Co., 87; first 

in N. J., 331: during Revolution, 331 
Metlar, George W., 180 
Metlar, Samuel, !ja5 



Mew, Richard, 112 

Michell. Lewis, 43 

Mlddlebrook, 166; Indian name for, 169; 
wagon traffic through, .584 

Middlebrook Camp in 1777. established in 
May, 415- 'oreaking camp in June, 422 

Middlebrook Camp in 1779, established in 
Nov., 454; weather at, 457; construction of 
huts at, 4.58; Steuben's quarters at, 472; its 
agreeable features, 474; brilliant young 
men at, 475; head(iuarters dinners, 456. 476; 
arrival of Spanish and French envoys, 482; 
grand reWew, 484, 488; Steuben's ban<iuet. 
487 ; an execution at, 489; breaking camp, 
492; Washington-Hardenbergh correspond- 
ence, 489; Simcoe at, 505; sale of horse at. 

515 

Middlebrook Tavern, 172, 4R0 
Middlesex Co., first inhabitants 103; patented 
by (tov. Nicholls, 117; Indian path through, 
183; British ravages in 1776, 326 
Middleto\\'n, assembly meets at, 110; settle- 
ment and origin of name, 115; 117; Indian 
path through, 183 
Militia, formation of in 1775-1777, 308: a tribute 
to N, J., 311; record of N. J., 312, 419; 
attack Howe's army in 1777, 419; lighting 
snowdrifts, 514; at Connecticut Farms and 
Springfield, 522-5; after the Revolution, 
577-579 
MUler, Catherine, (Melick) of Zion Ch.. 87; be- 
comes a Methodist, 88; Religious nature, 
88: genealogy, 682 
Miller, Henry, of New Germantown, 87,88; 

genealogy, 682 
Miller, Paul, 187 
Millidge, Ensign Phineas, 5.57 
Millidge, Major Thomas, 5.'S7 
Mills on Peapack Brook, 236. 249, 266 
Mills on the Raritan in 1752. 179 
Mills, Rev. Henry, 440 

Millstone, made the county seat. 166: Wash- 
ington's army at in 1777, 382; Genl. Dickin- 
son at, 401: Howe's army at in 1777, 417; 
Revolutionary devastation, 433; Simcoe 
burns the court-house, 505 
Millstone river, mills on, 179 
Mine Brook swimming hole, 11 
Ministers, importance of, in last century. 434; 
visiting taverns, 565; drinking habits of, 
447, 617, 618; as distillers, 619 
Minnisink Path, 183 
Minute men. 309. 310 

Miralles, Don Juan de, betting on Mrs. Jay's 
complexion, 477; reaches Camp Middle- 
brook in 1779. 482; at Boimd Brook Review, 
486; entertained by Steuben, 487; reat-lies 
Morrlstown in 1780. 516; death and burial, 
617 
MiBsiesippi River, hew considered In iMt cen- 
tury. 48:1 
Moelich, Andreas, (MallcV. Andrew). 2B; mar- 
riage of ai6: settles in Warren Co.. 305: 
founds St. James' Ch.. ;»5; commiHsioned a 
captain, .'<05: tonibstono of. 306: genealogy, 
6.32, 6:«; 



734 



Index. 



Moelich, .\iina Cathrine, 25, 629 

Moelich, Ehrenroich (see Malick, Aarou), 25; 
Warden ofZiou Ch.. 85, 87: Wardeu of St 
Paul's Ch., 93; siifnature of, 91; KenealoKy, 
632, 633 

Moelich, Geori? Anthon, 71, 633 

Moelich, Gottfried, emiMratea with Johannes, 
2.'>; baptism, 71: settles iu Warriin Co., N. J., 
74; his marriage, 75: two loyalist sons of, 
554, 5.55; estate of at death, 561; widow of, 
562; g-enealofO', 630, 670 

Moelich, Hans Peter (of Bendorf), 79, 629 

Moelich, Johan David (of Hunterdon Co,), 79, 
91, 92, 629 

Moelich, .Johannes, in Bendoi-f, 25; why he 
emigrated, 27: his arrival in Pa., 1735, 50: 
registers with Secy, of Pa., 56: letters from 
the old country, 66, 70, 72, 246: two children 
die in Bendoi-f, 70, 632; his home in Hunter- 
don Co., N. J„ 1750, 75; a warden of Zion 
church, 76, 79, 82, 91; how ho spells his 
name, 90, 9l. 92, 94, 143; subscribes for St. 
Paul's church at Pluckaniin, 92; his family 
in 1750, 95; i>urchase of the old farm, 9C, 
141, 143; facsimile of Bignaturu, 143; builds 
Old Stone House, 145, 146, 153, 154: starts for 
Perth Amboy in 1752, 156; appearance in the 
saddle, 157; rides through the woods, 166; 
first visit to Bound Brook, 167; rides down 
Raritan Valley in 1752, 175; clearing old 
farm, 234; grandfather, 245; household of 
in 1760, 245; death of, 247; will of, 304; grave 
of, 3«5; genealogy, 629, 631 

Moelich, -Johan Peter, his emigration, 26: 
arrival in Pa., 52; his son Tunis, 80; 
genealogy, 629, 682 

Moelich, Johan Peter (of Columbia Co., Pa.), 
629 

Moelich, Johan Wilhelm (father of Johannes), 
25,629 

Moelich, Joh. Michael, 72 

Moelich, Jonas (of Hunterdon Co.), 79, 87, 629 

Moelich, Maria Katrina in Bendorf, 25; first 
walk in Phila., 51; rests at Indian King 
Tavern, iiS: her father's family, 71; at the 
building of the Bedminster house, 146, 153, 
154; no gadding housewife, 240; character 
of, 240; a grandmother, 245: death of, 248 

Moelich, Marie Cathrine <dau. of Johannes), 
birth, 25; marries Simon Hlmrod, 277; gcne- 
alogrj-, 633, 656 

Moelich, Veronica Gerdrutta, birth of, 25; 
irodmoher of, 71 ; marries Jacob Kline, 75; 
calls her husband " a dumb Irishman," 238; 
genealogy, 632, 648 

MoUeson, John , 194, 195 

Moltke, Gen. von, 377 

Money baird, 219 

Monmouth, battle of, 385, 368, 456, 466, 488 

Monmouth Co., first inhabitants, 103; settli- 
ment and origin of name, 115: Indian path 
through, 183; slavoiy statistics, 227 

Monmouth, Kngland, 115 

Montfort, Simon do, 24 

Moutgomerie, Gov. John, 202 

Montrose, Earl of, 203 



Moody, Ensign James, 557 

Moore, Alexander, 188, 190 

Moore, Jonathan, 478 

Moore, Jlichael, 188 

Morgan, Col, and Gen. Daniel, reaches Morris- 
town in 1777, 406; record of, 407; at Van 
Veghten's bridge in 1777, 415; harasses 
Howe's army at Millstone; 419: attacks 
Comwallis at Woodbridge, 421; following 
Clinton's army in 1778, 450 

Morris, Col. Lewis, settles Shrewsburj-, and 
wives of, 115; St. Peter's Ch., 123 

Morris County, first settlement, 159; slavery 
statistics, 227; apple-jack introduced in 
615 

Morris, Dr. Jonathan Ford, 508 

Morris, General Lems, 115 

Morris, General Staats, birth of, 115; mar- 
riage of. 131 

Morris Gouverneur. birth of. 115: agent of 
Duchess of Gordon, 131; character of, 132; 
receives testimony as to British treatment 
of prisoners. 316, 362: his estimate of Missis- 
sippi river, 483; at constitutional conven- 
tion, 5.')2 

Morris, Gov. Lewis, birth of, 115; opinion of 
Cornbury, 201; appointed governor, 203: 
ch.aracter of and death, 203 

Morris, Jlrs. Margaret, 363 

Morris, Richard, settles JlorrUania, N. Y., 
115 

aiorris, Robert, 339, 468 

Monistown, founding of, 159: army at in 
1777, 390, 41.5, 42:5: population at outset of 
war, 397; churches of during Revolution 
397: punishing church members. 432; church 
established at, 159: encampment of 1780. 512; 
review at in 3780. 517: executions in 1780, 520; 
members of congress at in 1780, 524 ; meeting 
of Pa. line, 528; Benjamin Cooper's trial, 574 

Morristown Pres. Church, first established, 
159: during the Revolution, 397; Pres. dis- 
cipline, 432 

Mortimer's History of England, 40 

Morton -house, ship, arrival of, in 1728, 52 

Morton, Jacob, 402 

Morton, John, home of. at Basking Ridge, 
402; entertains French officers, 538 

Morton Washington, runs ofl' with Cornelia 
Schuyler, 402 

Mosijuitos, 114. 690 

Mott. Dr., 203 

Mount Holly, Hessians at 363; Revolutionary 
devastation at, 433 

Mount Hope Mine, 367 

Mount Pleasant, 419, 469 

Mount Vernon, 541 

Moylan, Col. Stephens, uniform of his dra- 
goons, 463; appearance and marriage of, 
480: home and character of, 480 

Mulilenburg, General, John, Peter, Gabriel, 
Ruttenburg's Eulogy of, 38: Pastor of Zion 
Church New Germ an town, 04; at St. James 
Luth. Ch,. 305: reaches Morristown in I777i 
412: characters and record of, 413: his com- 
m and at Morristown, 413: promoted brig 



Index. 



'35 



g'enl., 414; marches through Bedminster in 
July, 1V77, 424: g-ives a ball at MiiUUebrook 
in 1779, 458; at Bound Brook review, 485 

Muhlenberg-, Rev. Henrj' Ernst, 85 

Muhlenberg, Rev. Henr>- M., (Father) reaches 
America, 80; his character, 81; his letters to 
Zion Ch., 85-87; rector of Zion Ch. at Mew 
Germantown, 83; complains his conduct is 
misconstrued (Irish tricks), 238 

Muklewrath, Elder, 344 

Muller, Rev, Georg-e, 628 

Mundaye, Nicholas, 194 

Muller, John Henry (Henry Miller), 82, f)82 

Mundy, Enos, 336, 637 

Murray, Robert, 282 

Murray's Notes on Elizabethtown, 499 

Museonetcong- Valley in 1707, 37 

Mutinies of Pa. and N. J. lines, 528-531 

Mutiny of Pa. levies in 1783. 548 

NAPOLEON'S Art of War, 421 
Narraticong, or Raritan Indians, 98, 99 

National League, 623 

Nautilus, the steamboat, 588 

Navesink or Nauvessiug, 183 

Neil, Capt. Daniel, 377 

Neilson, Col. John, record of and residence, 
398, .585; after Queen's Rangers, 506 

Neilson, Mrs John, 397 

Nelson, James, 187 

Neshanic, R. D. Ch., 256, 263 

Neuw-ied, 36 

Neversink, 183 

Nevill, Samuel, coming to America of, 141, 
142; honors and dignities, 142; death of, 143; 
dwelling of, 2U 

Nevill's laws, 142 

Nevius, Capt. Joseph, 249, 251 

Nevius, Johanna, 617 

Nevius, Johannes, 251 

Nevius, Petrus, 251 

Nevius, Wilhelmus, 617 

New .American Magazine, 142 

Newark Bay, first Europeans on, 103 

Newark Causeway, 590 

Newark, settlement and origin of name, 109; 
condition m 1682, 117; in 1776, 303: Washing- 
ton and Howe's array in, in 1776, 320: Pres. 
Church destroyed, 433; first Sunday school 
in, 440; in 1784, .590 

New Barbadoes, 118, 477 

New Brunswick, condition in 1730, 180, 185, 186, 
187; first inhabitant of, 184; first church 
building, 185; first charter, 187; churches in 
1752,193; copper mines at, 193; stage lines, 
228; condition in 1776, 303: Washington and 
Comwallis at, in 1776, 321; Christ Ch., in, 
189, 193, 3:«; Howe's army at, 408: Howe 
evacuates in 1777, 419; Revolutionary devas- 
tation at, 433; Washington's army at, 4 
July, 1778: 452; furnishes cpjeensware for 
head(iuarters, 456: allied armies at, .535; 
banks established at, .582; prosperity after 
the Revolution, 584; old merchants of, .585; 
first steamboat to, .587; Bcllona Hall, 589; 
Raritan bridge dtstroyed, .591: arrival of 
stage coaches at, .592 



New Bi-unswick R. D. Church, 185, 193, 254 

Newburg, settlement of, 38 

Newbum, N. C, origin of name, 43 

Newbury, Mass., 108 

New England slave trade, 223 

Now Germantown, N, J., founded in 1730, 76: 
Zion L'.theran Ch. at, 77; name first men- 
tioned, 78; Lee's army at, 344: council of 
safety meet at, in July, 1777, 430. 

New Jersey in Revolution, 319 

New Jersej' levies, 376 

New Jersey line, first establishment, 307: 
second establishment, 404; third establish- 
ment, 405; at Pompton in 1781, 528; muting 
of, 531 

New Jersey, origin of name, 104; birth of 
state, 299; in Revolution, 319; ratifies con- 
stitution, 551, .553 

New Market, Seventh Day Church at. 197; 
Washington's army at, in 1777, 420: Simcoe 
at, 504 : Thomas Randolph tarred and feath- 
ered, 556 

New Netherlands, 103, 104; recaptured by 
Dutch in 1673, 110 

Newport bridge, 600 

New Providence, N. J., 106 

New Providence, Pa.. 81, 83 

Newspapers, first Revolutionarj', 282 

New York city, its charters of 1676 and 1730, 
187; growth in 1778, 586 

Nicoll, Mathias, 203 

NichoUs, Gov., protests against the dukes 
giving away N. J., 105; patents Elizabeth- 
town trrant, 106; patents Monmouth to 
Richd. Stout, 117 

Nisbitt, Jonathan, 141 

North Branch, R. D. Church, 224, 251, 252 

North Branch of Raritan, view of, from Pea- 
pack stage, 4 

North, Major William, 473, 4sa 

Nova Cesaroa, 104 

Nut Island, Palatines encamp on, 45 

Nymeguen, treaty of, 33 

O.A.KEY. J.\COB, 187, 191 
Oakey, origin of name, 192 

Oakey, William, 187 

O'Brien, Daniel, 228 

Obstetrics, .568 

Ogden, Aaron, 491, 588 

Ogden, Col. Matthias, 507 

Ogden, Dr. Uzal, 226 

Ogden, John, 106 

Ogden, ton', •'«0 

Ogilby. Prof. John. 386 

" Old Farm," approach to the. 12; descrip- 
tion of, 13-21 : purchase of, 96; boxmdariea 
in 17.51, 97: cost and title. 98: Indian traces 
on, 100; clearing the land, 234; life on from 
1752 to 17(i;t, 23:} 

Olding, William, 195 

Old Sow, 513 

Old Stone House, first view of, 16; livlnK 
room or farm kitchen, 18, 210: building of, 
145, 146, 1.53: th'- first meal in, 1.54: eating 
and drinking in, 17, is, 1.51. '239. 240: sugar 
first used in. 2:»: iuduatnes of, 239, 242: 



736 



Index. 



furniture of, IH, ail ; utensils in, 241 ; wear- 
insr apparel of inmates, 241 ; Washing day 
343: first baby, 245; household in 1760, 245, 
on a military thorouKhfare, 390; W'ashing-- 
ton's visit to, 391: survey of household in 
1788, 5&»: Daniel Cooi)er'9 wedding in, ;»73; 
negro slaves in, 602-9: household in 1798, 6O4 

Onderdonk's Revolutionai-y Incidents, 362, 368 

Op de Millstone Church, 180, 2M 

Opie Farm , 14 

Opie, Walter, 76 

Oppey, Ann, a&l 

Opsinderin, 190, 263 

Otto, GeorK Peter, 65, 71, 72 

Otto, Magdalena Christina Cathariua Antou- 
etta, 65 

PACK-HORSES in Phila. in 1735, 61 
Paintings, first collection in America, 
210 

Palatinates, their hegira to London in 1709, 
39: their settling in Ireland, 41; the Caro- • 
linas, 43: N. Y , 44, 46; Livingston Manor. 
47; Pennsylvania, 48: their numbers on the 
Hudsou, 46: their grievances against N. Y., 
47: Pa. laws as to registry, 46 

Paoli, Wayne's surprise at, 466 

Parker, Elisha, 108 

Parker, James, of Amboy, 211, 328 

Pai'ker, -James, of Woodbridge prints E'town 
bill in chancery, 107; prints Nevill's laws 
and Smith's hist, of N. J., 142 

Parker, John, 120 

Parker, Sir Peter, 291, 312 

Parsippany, 403 

Pastorius, Francis Daniel, settles German- 
town, :«, 39: His death, 61 

Paterson, William, asst.-sec., 1st Prov. Con- 
gress. 287; member Provl. Congress of 1776, 
297; Committee to depose Gov. Franklin, 
300; record of, :«)1: member Council of Saf- 
ety, 431: at Constitutional Convention, 552 

Paulns Hook, .590 

Paupei-s, 596 

Pausch. Captain, 364 

Pauw, Michael, 118 

Pavonia, 118 

Peace, treaty of, 547 

Peale's, Washington, 495, 496 

Peapack, the stage, 1; origin of name. 125; In- 
dian paths, 125. 183; lime first used, 235 

Peapack Patent, granted to Johnston and 
Willocks. 125: its limits, 130, 132: Axtell 
buys portion of, 133; division of remainder, 
137, 139 

Pearson, Abraham, 109 

Penhorn Creek, 118 

Penn. John, 299 

Penn, William, his .•Vmcrican grant, 36: his 
inducements for settlers, 39; Phila. house 
of, 58, 59; buys an interest in N. J., 110, ill, 
112 

Pennington, in 1776, Cornwallis' army at, .'M5 

Pennsylvania, inducements it ofl'ered to 
German emigrants, 26, 38, 39: arrival of the 
Palatines, 48: its German i>opulationin 1717, 
1719, 1727. 1738, 4749, and 1766, 48-49 



Pennsylvania Merchant, brigantine, voyagre,. 
and arrival in 1733, 51 

Peppard, Rev. Francis, 436 

Pepys' opinion of Lady Carteret, 105 

Ferine, Peter and Daniel, 564, 634 

Perry, Samuel, 430 

Perth Amboy, settlement and origin of 
name, 113; Raritan and S. I. ferries estabd., 
122; in 1752 is Somerset's P. O,, 156; con>or- 
ate limits of, 187 : as a provincial capital' 
200; chartered in 1718, 201: beauty of, 199,. 
205; Love Grove, Sandy Point, and Town 
Gre«n, 206, 207; lack of patriotism, 208; St. 
Peter's Ch., 123, 137, 141, 211. Pres., Ch., 212; 
social aspects, 215: tales of a King's council- 
lor, 217: taverns in 1752, 206, 228; stage; 
routes through, 229; a garrison town, 329; 
disattection at in 1776, 208, 329; Simcoe at, 
503: treasury robbed at, 575 

Perth, Earl of, 112 

Perth. Scotland, 113 

Pettinger, John, 560 

Petty, John, 560 

Pewter, use of, 54 

Philadelphia, in 17.35, 50; population of, 52; 
Indian King tavern, 57; Christ Church 
adjoins the Pond, 57; Quakers in 1735, 58; 
Penn's house, 58; Equipage in 1735, 61: yel- 
low fever in, 63; stage lines to, 22«: con- 
tinental army in 1777, 333; Washington at, 
370; British evacuate, 450; allied armies at, 
.t35, 537, 540: Yorktowu surrender announced 
at, .>J1: bank of N. A. established, 581; old 
Union Line to, 588 

Phila. light-horse, 1st troop, 376 

Philip, ship, arrival of in 1665, 105 

Pliillips, General, 532 

Phillips, Maj. Joseph, 313 

Phillipsbnrg, Lee's army at, 344 

Phil's Hill, 480, 503 

Pha-uix, John, 290 

Phcenlx, Sarah, 290 

Physicians, 566-572 

Physicians, ministers as, 438, 497 

Pickel, Abi'aham, 147 

Pickel, Balthazar (Baltis) advent in Hunter- 
don Co , 79: grave, 79: warden of Zion Ch.. 
78-87 

Pickel, William, 147 

Pickel's Mountain, 79 

Pictorial Effect of War, 416 

Piece of Eight, value of, 98 

Pierce, Daniel, 108 

Pietei-se, Christian, 118. 191 

Pike, Genl. Zebulon Montgomery, 108 

Pike, John, patriarch of Woodbridge, 108- 
109 

Pinhorne, William, 118 

Piscataqua Maine, 108 

Piscataway, an Indian village, 99: settlement 
and name of, 108. 184: assembly meets at,. 
110; condition in 1682, 117: Johannes' visit 
to, in 1752, 193: town records, 195; Baptist 
churches established, 196, 197; St. Jamca'" 
Church, 198; Howe's ai-my in, in 1776, 323 



Index. 



737 



Pitlochie, Laird of, 126, 127 

PittsburK, in 1776, 302 

Plainfield, 230, 303; Quaker meeting at 331; 
flighting at, 421 

Plainfield, South, 125 

Plaquemine, 165 

Plows in last century, 235 

Pluckamin, first view of, 3; arrival of stage, 
4: St. Paul's Lutheran Ch. at, 84, 85. 92, 93, 
94; Eofl's purchase, 140, 162; appearance in 
1752, 162-164; origin of name, 165; cavalry 
raids in, 326; Washington's army at, in 1777, 
383: Mrs. Washington at, 397: the artillery 
park in 1779, 461 ; General and Mrs. Knox at, 
in 1779,463; the French alliance fete, 466; 
death of JuUa Knox at, 470: Jacobus Van 
der Veer's insane daughter, 471; general 
trainings at, 478, 607; old time storekeepers, 
531, 583; burial of Aaron Malick, 610 

Pluckamin Mountain, first view of, 3 

Plumsted, Clement, 112 

Pompton, army halts there in rainstorm, 
423; the Schuyler and Colfax homesteads, 
477. 478; N. J. line at, in 1781, 528; mutiny 
at, .531 

Pool, John, 585 

Post Offices in 1752, 157 

Post, Theunis, 224 

Potts, Joseph C, 3.50 

Potts, Stacy, 3.50, 599 

Pound, colonial, in 1752, 98 

Powelson, Jacob, 131 

Powles Hook, Lee attacks, 492 

Pres. Church, Amwell, 174; Bound Brook, 171, 
173: New Brunswick, 193: Princeton, 175, 495 

Presbyterians in the Revolution, 4,33, 443; 
beer at presbytery, 618 

Princeton, army retreats through in 1776, 
321; General Putnam at in 1877, 400, 401; 
Revolutionary devastation, 4;«: Pres. 
Church in Revolution, 495; appearance in 
1748, 499; allied armies at, 535; Claude 
Blanchard's description of, 537 

Princeton, Battle of, 377, 395, 466, 495 

Princeton College, educates Shawriskhekung, 
102; lottery for benefit of, 174; Jonathan 
Edwards' presidency, 214; Witherspoon's 
presidency, 296; the commencements of 
1779 and 1883, 495; at battle of Princeton, 
378, 495; during Revolution, 495: Gov. 
Belcher's library, 496; naming Nassau 
Hall, 496; foundmgof college, 497; removal 
to Princeton, 499; studies in last centurj', 
500: confers degree on Nathan Strong, 619 

Procession of the seasons, 266 

Procter's Artillery Regt., 376, 409 

Propriety interests, their sub-div., 119, 120 

Provincial Congresses, 287, 289, 291, 293, 297 

Provincial officers in English army, 5,57 

Provisional N. J. Regt., 313, 314 

Prussia, 67 

Putnam, Genl. Israel, at Princeton in 1777, 
400: at Camp Middlebrook in 1779, 457; pro- 
tests against liquor selling, 620 



QUAKERS, in Penna. in 176C, 49; In PhUa. 
in 1735, 58; buy half of N. J., 110; Ben- 
jamin Clarke disciplined by, 178; at Plain- 
field, 331; in Revolution, 331; in Mendham, 

332 
Quassalck Creek, 38 
Queen's An.arican Rangers, the, SOI 
Queen's College, 261 , .500 
Queen's Own, the. 345, 521 
Quibbletown, Seventh Day Church at, 197; 

Washington's Army at, 420; Simcoe at, 604; 

Thomas Randolph tarred and feathered, 

556 
Qizick, Abraham, 131 
Quilting frolics, 239 
Quinti partite deed. 111 

RAID of Queen's Rangers, 501 
Raikes, Robert, 439 

Railroad statistics, 232 

Rail, Colonel, 348, 349 

Randolph, Peyton, 2&5 

Randolph, Thomas, 556 

Rankin, Rev. John C, 159 

Rapahannock, Va., the Falls of, Germans at 
44 

Raritan Church, when erected, 251, 252; de- 
struction of, 433, 505, 509; present church 
built, 510 

Raritan Indians, 98, 99, 169 

Raritan Landing, lots sold by lottery, 174, 
industries iu 1752, 179; destruction of water- 
power, 180: the Low mansion, 180: Simcoe's 
raid, 506: stores and warehouses at, 585 

Raritan river in 1650, 169; Mills on, in 1752, 
179; Col, Laurens descriptien, 452; frozen 
for 4 months, 513 

Raritan, the steamboat, 588 

Raritan Valley, in 1650, 169: In 1752, 175: John 
Field's purchase in 1695, 176; mills in 1752, 
179; distilleries in 619 

Ratisbon, treaty of, 33 

Raynal, the abbe, 221 

Read, Rev. Israel, 171 

Reading, John, 203, 204 

Readington township, origin of name, 20;j 

Redemptioners. 148-153 

Reed, Chae., of Phila., 56 

Reed, Col. Joseph, 377, 500 

Religion during Revolution, 433 

Religion iu last century, 213, 427 

Religion in N. J., in 18th century, 213, 431, 
498 

Rentals in last century, 205 

Reporter, Revolutionary, 469 

Reuber, Corpl. Johannes, :«8 

Reusch, Rev. Johannes, 629, 630, &n, 670 

Revolutionary War, cause of, 281 ; close of, 
547; prostration after, 549, 563 

Reynolds, Daniel, 575 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 485 

Rhodes, Charles, 561 

Ribble, George, 560 

Richardson, Joseph, .597, 699 

Richards, Rev., 445 

Richie, .\nn, 137, 138 

Richmond, Duchess of, 616 



738 



Index. 



Richmond, James, 586 

Kidlty, Matthew, 404 

Riedesel, Baroness, 239 

Biedesel, Gen. von, 239, 359 

RiKtf, Ambrose, 112, 120 

Rinehart, Godfrey, of Zion Ch., 88 

Road, a coimtrj-, 12 

Roads, early, Bemardsville to Lamington, 
181; Great Raritan, 167; Dutch trail and 
King-'s hig^hway, 182; Trenton to Amboy, 
229; York, 230; Somerville to Pluckamin, 
166; their condition in 1768, 231 

Roberts, Lieut. Owen, 543 

Robeson's Mills, 179 

Robin, Abbe, 537 

Robinson, Joseph, 291 

Rochambeau, Count de, 526, 531, 540 

Rochefoucault-Liancourt, Duke of, 502 

Rocky HiU, 179, 321 

Bodgers, Rev. John, 441, 442, 445 

Rodney, Capt. Thomas, at Assunpink and 
Princeton, 374; diary of, 381, 386; at Pluck- 
amin In 1777, 385; marohing- to Morristown, 
388; James Tilton's letter to, 538 

Roe, Rev. Azel, 445 

Roelifson, Lawrence, of Zion Church, 82, 90 

Rog-ei-s, Major Robert, 501 

Rogers Rock, 501 

Romeyn, Rev. Theo. F., 594 

Rosbnigh, Kev. John, 444 

Roseng-arten, J. G., 367 

Ross, Dr. Alex., 189 

Ross Hall, 189, 585 

Roxiticus, 1.59 

Roj-al Deux Font's regt., 536 

Roycefield, 170 

Royce, John, 170 

Ruckert, Simon Ludwi?, 66, 70 

Rudyard, Benjamin, 120 

Rudyard, Thomas, 112: as deputy-gov., 119, 
120, 132; buys land at Bound Brook, 170 

Ruin, Johannes' first drink of, 57; introduced 
in .America, 614 

Runyon, David D., 195 

Runyon, Noah D., 195 

Runyon, Peter..A., 198 

Runyon, Peter P., 586 

Rupp, Prof. I. D., 41 

Bush, Dr, Benjamin, when he signed the 
Declaration, 296; letter to Gen. Lee, 339; at 
battle of Princeton, 377. 379; at funeral 
of Capt Leslie, 385; record of, 387; his 
graduation, 500; as a temperance re- 
former, 620-623 

Rush, Leaney, 596 

Rutgers CoUeKe, 261, 500 

Rutgers, N. J., origin of name, 192 

Rutherford. 118 

Buthcrford, Walter, 136 

Buttenburgh, E M., Newbur's historiang. 38 

SABINES loyalists, 557, f>59 
Sagorighweysghsta, 101 
St. Clair, Gen. Arthur, 373 
St. James' Ch., Piscataway, 197 
St. James, Lutheran Ch., 305 
St. John's Church, Etown. 174 



St. Paul's Lutheran Ch. Pluckamin. 81, 85, 
94; damaged by British. ;i26; as a prison 
in 1777, 3>«, 434; Capt. Leslie buried in 
churchyard, .385 

St. Peter's Church, .Amboy, 123: benefits by 
Willock's will, 137: pewholders in. 141; par- 
sonage. 211; Sunday morning at, 219 

Saintonge reg't, 536 

Salaries, official, 301 

Salem, N. J., founding- of, 110 

Salmon's Herbal, .569 

Sand as a floor covering, 17,54. Iiv4 

Sanford, Capt., 503, 5, 7, 8 

Sanford, Capt, Wm., 118 

Sandy Hook, first white man's grave in N. J., 
103: first shipwreck on, 116; Clinton's army 
on, 450; hanging of Huddy, 542, 543 

Sandy Point, 206 

Sankhicans, 99 

Saugerties, Palatines at, 46 

Savannah, 601 

Sayn-altenkirchen, countj- of, 68 

Scammel. Major Alexander, on Sullivan's 
staff, 311 : sacrifice of, at Camp Middlebrook, 
481: correspondence and death of, 482; 
march to Virginia, 535 

Scarboroug-h, arrival of ship, 203 

Schenck, Alche, 250 

Schenck, Capt. Henry, 327 

Schenck. Col. John, 327 

Schenck, Heudrick, 179 

Schenck, John, 429 

Schenck, Peter, 292, 429 

Schenck. Rev. George, 6 

Scheyichbj, Indian name for N. J„ 98 

Schmidt, Rev, Joh. Georg.. of Bendorf, 70. 
630. 633, 656, 670 

Schniz.lein, Carl, 354 

Scoharie Co., N. V„ Palatines In, 46 

S(;homp's Mills, 16; establishment of, 249, 267; 
description of, 270; purchased by X. Arro- 
smith, 598 

Schooley's Mountain in 1707, 37 

Schrenck, Rev. Ludolph H., of Zion Ch., 82 

Schureman, James, 508 

Schuyler. Abm.. David and Philip P., 189 

Schuyler. Arent, 477 

Schuyler, Casparus, 477 

Schiiyler, Colfax, 478 

Schuyler, Comeha, 402 

Schuyler, Derrick, 187. 189 

Schuyler, Elizabeth, 516 

Schuyler, Gen. Philip, 341, 476. 477, 517, 560 

Schuyler, Hester, 478 

Schuyler, Peter. buys^Grov. Carteret's house, 

105 

Schuyler's " Colonial New York," 180 

Schwartz, George, of Zion Ch., 91 

Schwenckfelders, arrival of in Pa., 51 

Scotch emigration, 27, 114, 127, 442 

Scotch Johnny's N. Y. tavern, 228 

Scotch Plains, Gen. Sullivan at. in 1777. 401 

Scott, George, 126, 127 

Scott, ITof. Avistin, 188, 190 

Scudder, Dr. John, Joseph and Mary. 315 

Seabury, Rev. Samuel. 174 



Index. 



739 



Seahorse, tho steamboat. 588 

Sears, Isaac, 281 

Sebring, Abraham. 179 

Sebring-, Roelef, 185 

Segars, 241 

Serg:eant, Jonathan D., 28T, 288 

Seventeenth British Reg't, 328, 373, 378, 386 

Seventh-Day Baptists, 197 

Sharp, Christian, 560 

Shaw, John, 430 

Shaw, John C„ 459 

Shaw, Major Samuel, 465 

Shawriskhekiintr, 102 

Sheep contract, a, .580 

Sheldon's litrht-horse, 341, 491 

Shenandoah Valley Germans, 43 

Shippen, Dr. William, 568 

Shippen. Joseph, Jnn'r, 499 

Shoemakers, g-enerals as. 239 

Sholtze, David, arrival in Pa., 51 

Shooting matches, 432 

Shrewsbury, settlement of, 115 

Shuppman, Jacob, of Ziou Ch.. 90 

Silesia, 67 

Siloy, Samuel, 430 

Simcoe, Col. John Graves, 502 

Sing-ing in churches, 436 

Six Blile Run, 165, 179 

Six Mile Run Omrch, 252, ^rU 

Six Nations of N. Y. send the Delawares 
west, 57; their locality, 99; honor Gov. Ber- 
nard, 101; in 1776, 302; Sullivan's campaign 
against, 490 

Sixteenth British Light Dragoons, 345 

Skelton, Thomas, Phila's first hackman, 61, 62 

Skinner, Courtlandt, 329, 557 

Skinner, Rev. William, 12,3, 198, 211, 329 

Slater, Edward, 194, 195, 196 

Slaves, buying ground of, 13; a negro auction 
in Phila., 5;j; short hist, ©t, in N. J., 220; in 
Perth Amboy, 223; New England, 223; value 
in N. J., 224, 226; cruel punishments, 225; 
colonial and N. J., slavery statistics, 227; 
manumission lavvs, 227; in Georgia in 1792, 
600; on the Old Farm, 602-612: auction sale 
of, on Old Farm, 611 

Slave trade, 221 

Sloops on the Delaware, 231, 587 

Sloops on the Raritau, 585 

Sloop travel, 229, 230 

Smalley, Isaac, 195, 196 

Smalley, John, 194 

Smallpox, .572 

Smallwood, Col. William, 374 

Smiley. William R., 611 

Smith, Dr. Stanhope, .500 

Smith, Ensign William, 579 

Smithfield (New Germantown), 78 

Smith, Margaret, 137 

Smith, Miles, .586 

Smith, Peter, 560 

Smith, Ralph, the founder of New German- 
town, 77: leases laud to Zion church, 78 

Smith, Richard, 105 

Smith, William Lovet, 75 

Smith's Hist, of N. J., 142 



Snell's Hist, of Hunterdon and Somei-set, 1.34 

Society for propogation of the Gospel in 
foreign parts, 123, 196, 198, 497 

Soissonnais reg't, S36 

Soldiers of 1776, 332, 334 

Somerset Co., first permanent inhabitant, 
106; when set ofl', 165; wild beasts in, 167: 
Indian path through, 183: first church in, 
185; slavery statistics. 227 

Somerset Land Grants, 129 

Somerville, stage routes, 1, 230; birth of, 165, 
509; condition in 1779, 455 

Sonmans, Arent, 112, 141 

Sonmans, Joseph, 101 

Southard, Abraham, 160 

Southard, Henry, 161, 402 

Southard, Samuel L., 101, 161, 402 

Southern campaign of 1731, 532-541 

Spain, relations with, in 1779, 483 

Spinning, 175, 239, 242 

Spinning visits, 239 N 

Springfield, N. J., stages through,230;patriotic 
women, of, 333: Pres. Church destroyed, 
433; first Sunday-school in, 440; battle of, 
523, 525 

Spring Valley, 392 

Staats. Barent and Katrina, 189 

Staats House at Bound Brook, 472, 457 

Staats, Major Abraham, 115 

Stage coaches, 591, 592 

Stage travel, 1742 to 1752, 228; Swiftsure 
coach line, 230; hardships of, 231, 591 

Stair. Earl of, 106 

Stamp act, Tlie, 281, 282 

Stanwix, Fort, 622 

State House at Phila. when new, 56 

Staten Island. Stirling's sally in 1780, 515 

State troops, 376 

Steamboats, introduction of, 587 

Steele, Richard, as a friend of Gov. Robert 
Hunter, 44 

Steele, Capt. John, .524 

Steel, John, 430 

Stelle, Benjamin, 196 

Stelton, 196 

Stephen, Genl. .\dam, 372 

Sterling, Genl., 521 

Steuben, Baron Frederick W. A., at Valley 
Forge, 374, 472; character and appearance, 
471, 472; his " Regulations for infan- 
try," 473; iiuartersof at Bound Brook, 472; 
at Bound Brook review, 485; staff officers of, 
533 

Stevens, .John, 188 

Stewart, Col. Charles, 398 

Stewart, Col. (of Pa. line) 5.30 

Stewart, James, 561 

Stewart, Lieut. James, 501 

Stillwater, (reorge, 76 

Stirling, Lady, as a hostess in 1777, 402 

Stirling, Lady Kitty, as a hostess in 1777, 402; 
at Pluckamin Fete, 4e7; wedding of, 493; 
entertains Mauasseh Cutler, 496 

Stirling Lord, wife of, 135; house and estate 
of, 160, :«I7; arrests Gov. Franklin. 3X): 
removed from King's Council. 298; John 



740 



Index. 



\ ; 



Penn's letter to, 299; record of, 306; on 
retreat through Jerseys, 321 ; at battle of 
Trenton, 349; at battle of Long- Island. 314, 
367, 358, 375: sends relief to Lincoln at Bound 
Brook, 410: staff officers of, 491, 533; decay 
of his mansion, 493; loss of fortune, 494; 
sally on S, I., in 1780, 515 

Stockton, Major Richard, 558 

Stockton, Richard, 78, 219, 326 

Stockton, Robert, 599 

Stone, William, L,, 296, 158. 360 

Stony Point, attack on, 492 

Stoothoft'. Sarah, 191 

Storekeepers, 582, 586, 592 

Stout. Family, 117 

Stout. Josiah, 586 

Stout, Richard, receives patent of Monmouth 
Co.. 117 

Stover's Mills. 203 

Stoves, first in Bedminster Ch.. 265 

Stowe, Mrs. Harriet Boecher, 223 

Streit, Leonard, 94, 135 

Streit, Rev. Christian, 305 

Strong, Rev. Nathan, 619 

Stryker, Capt. John, 387 

Strj-ker, Genl. Wm, S., 306, 373, 532, .557 

Stryker, Sarah. .582 

Stutzer. Cornet Johan, 362 

Sugar, first used in Old Stone House, 238 

Sug-ar-houses. 316, 445 

Sullivan, Geul. John, eulogy of Col. John- 
ston, 314; appearance of, 336; commands 
Lee's army, 341, 344 ; at battle of Trenton. 
349; Aaron Malick's description of. 385: at 
Scotch Plains in 1777,401; his Indian cam- 
paifcn, 490; staff officers of, 533 

Sumner, Prof., W. D., 98 

S)inday observances, 437, 438 

Sunday-schools, introduction of. 439 

Sutphen CTuisbert, subscribes to St, Paul's 
ch., 93: at Laming-ton ch„ 158: aids in build- 
ing' Bedminster ch., 263: treasurer of Bed- 
minster ch., 276; member of Com. of Observ- 
ation and Inspection, 286, 289; commissioned 
justice of the Peace, 576 

Sutphen, John, 290 

Sutphen, Peter, 577 

Sutton, Levi, 597, 607 

Swift, Dean, as a friend of Gov. Robert Hun- 
ter. 44 

Swiftsiire coach line, 230 

Symmes, Jolm Cleves, 302, 396, 404 

Symmes, Judge Timothy, 561 

TANNERY on Leslie's Brook, 75; on Pea- 
pack Brook, 236, 267, 271 
Xansy punch, 616 
Tarleton, Banastre, 345 
Tavern rates in 1748, 228 
Taylor, Adj't. William. 5.58 
Taylor, General John, 602, 603 
Taylor, Sheriff John, 558 
Tea first used in N. J., 238 
Teeple, Christopher, 94 ; residence of, 164 
Teeple, Georg«, subscribes to St. Paul's Ch., 

93; buys Bedminster laud, 130; residence of 

164 



Teeple, John, subscribes to St. Paul's Ch.. 93, 
94; residence of. 135, 164; summoned by 
Council of Safety, 430 

Teeple, Peter, 430 

Teleifraph, first in N. J.. 230 

Teller, Kev. W., 440 

Temperance movement, 620-623 

Ten Eyck, Capt. Jacob, 178,306 

Tennent, Dr. V. B., 568 

Tennent, Rev. Gilbert, 193, 213, 153, 431 

Terhime, Albert and Eva, 253 

Terrible, arrival of ship, 204 

Thacher, Surj-'eon James, 4.57, 458, 468 

Theatre, first in America, 218 

Theodoric, king- of GlamorKan, 115 

TheolOKy in last centurj', 213 

Theveny, Pastor, 628 

Thii-ty Years' War, 30, 36; Destruction of 
Langendorf, 36; Destruction of Heidelberg, 
42 

Thomas, Capt. Evan, 543 

Thomas, Lt. Col., 309 

Thompson, Elder, Wm., 440 

Thompson, Hon. Jos., 75 

Thomson. John, 430 

Thompson, Rev. Henry P., 432 

Thompson, Samuel, 170 

Thompson, John, 188 

Thoreau, 276 

Three Mile Run, 185 

Three Mile Run Church, 185, 252 

Thumers. Rev. Georg of Bendorf, 71 

Tiltrhman, Col. Tench, character and ap- 
pearance of, 475; engagement and mar- 
riage, 517; brings news of Yorktown sur^ 
render, .541 

Tilghman, Philemon, 475 

Tilton, Jane, .538 

Tinturu. Vale of, 115 

Tinton, 115 

Tobacco in last century, 241 

Tomer, Margaret, 562 

Tolstoi's Science of War, 393 

Toms River, 54.3. .568 

Toucey, Isaac, 172 

Tories and loyalists, their oppressions ilk 
1776, 323; treatment of, 505, 554-562 

Tory Jim, .504 

Training days, 47S, 578, 607 

Travelling, stage routes across N. J., 228, 229, 
236, 589, 590; roads and taverns, 228, 231, 591. 
692; sloops, 230, 586, 587; steamboats intro, 
duced, 587 ; stage coaches, 591, 592 

Treadwell, A.M., 393 

Treat, Robert, 109 

Trenton, battle of, 349, 358, 368, 466 

Trenton, founding of, 60; a P. O. in 1752. 156; 
in 1748, 186; stage lines to, 228; prosperity 
in 1748, 229 ; Washington's army reaches, in 
1776, 321 ; first Methodist in, 331 ; first Sun- 
day-school in, 440; Mrs. Washington at, in 
1780, 516; allied armies at. 532. 537; Wash- 
ington's (luarters. Jan.. 1777. 657 

Trent, William, of Phila., 60 

Troup, Lieut. Robert. 316 

Trumbull, Gov. Jonathan, 297, 3C0 



Index. 



741 



Tryon, Gen'l, 521 

Tucker. Dr. Dean of Gloster, 330 

Tucker, Sam'l, 292, 294, 328 

Tureniie, General, 33 

Turkey, N. J., 106 

Turner, Eobert, 112 

Tuscarora Indians massacre Germans in 

No. Carolina, 44; join the Five Nations of 

N. Y., 99 
Tuttle, Kev. Joseph F., 397 
Tuyneson, John, 252 

Twenty-four proprietors of East N. J., 112 
Tye, Col., 542 
Tyler Wat, 40 

UNIFORMS, Continental in 1776, 332, 335 _ 
341; of N. J. Line, 333; of Sheldon's' 
liKht-horse, 341 ; Queen's OwTi, 345; Hessians 
358,417; British, 417; Brunswick Dragoons 
358; Continental in 1779, 463; Knox's artillery, 
462 
Uniforms, French, 536, 538. 539 
Union Co., Clayton's history of, 523 
United States, condition of, in 1776, 302 
Utensils, household, 241 

VACCINATION, 573 
Vail, John, 142 

Valley Forge, 374, 449, 488 

Van Ardsdale, Capt, Isaac, 327 

Van Ardsdalen, Hendrick, subscribes to St. 
Paul's Ch., 93 

Van Ardale s hotel, 600 

Van Bergh, Dinah, her friend Alche Van 
Doren, 250; marries John Freling'huysen, 
254, 258; Hardenbergh's wooing and mar- 
riage, 255, 259 ; character of, 256-260; journal 
of, 257; letters to Dr. Livingston. 261; in 
Bedminster, 263; death of, 262; atBedmin- 
sterCh., inl77S,435 

Van Busshkerk of Zion Ch„ 87 

Van Boskerck, origin of name, 118. 191 

Van Buskirk, Lieuts, John and Thomas, 558 

Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 588, 589 

Vanderea, David, 560 

Van der Veer, Dr. Henry, 5, 327 

Van der Veer, Dominicus, 162 

Van der Veer, Elias, 162, 327 

Van der Veer Family, origin of, 162; varied 
spelling of name, 276 

Van Der Veer Jacobus, at Lamington Church, 
158; settles on the Axtell tract, 135, IGl; aids 
in building Bedminster Ch.., 263; his bond 
to John Van der Veer, 276; Knox quarters 
with, 463 ; death of his insane daughter, 470 

Van der Veer, Jansse, 161 

Van der Veer, John, 131 

Van der Veer, John, of Flatbush, 276 

Van der Veer, J. T.. 131 

Van der Veer, Philip, 1.31 

Van der Veer's Mills, 4. 162 

Vandeventer, Christopher, 430 

Vandeventer, Jacob, 597 

Van Doren, Alche, 250 

Van Doren, Christian, 249 

Van Doren, Jacobus, 249 

Van Doren, John, Washington quarters with, 
383 



Van Doren, Mrs. John, hung by the heels, 382 

Van Doren, Lewis A., 250 

Van Doren, Sherifl' Abram, 226, 249 

Van Doren, William A., 250 

Van Doru & Ditmars, 592 

Van Dyck, John, of New Brunswick, 188 

Van Dyck, o'iglu of name, 191 

Van Dyke, Lieut. John, 376 

Van Dyke, Major John, 558 

Van Dyke, Ruloff, 294 

Vanetta, Peter, 560 

Van Home. Cornelius, 147 

Van Home, origin of name, 191 

Van Home, Philip, 480, 503 

Van Houten, John G., 147 

Van Neste, Jacob, John, and Peter, 226, 250 

Van Neste, Pieter, 252 

Van Neste, Rynier, 283 

Van Nest. Jerome, 131 

Van Nordeu, Peter. 173 

Van Norden, Tobias, 173 

Van Nuys, John, 188, 192 

Van Nuys, origin of name, 192 

Van Pelt, origin of name, 192 

Van Princis, Penelope, 116 

Van Quellen, Robt., 108-109 

Van Riper, or Van Ripen, origin of name, 191 

Van Schoenderwoert, Jacobus, 192 

Van Tienhoven, Cornelius, 161 

Van Veghten's Bridge, Simcoe at, 503, 505 

Van Veghten, Derrick, 416, 458 

Van Veghten House, 458, 459, 474, 479 

Van Veghten, Michael, 252, 458 

Van Voorn. Jacobus, 249 

Van Voorst, Cornelius, lis 

Van Wagenen Family. 118, 192 

Van Wart, origin of name, 192 

Van Winkle, origin of name, 191 ^ 

Vaughau. Rev. Edward. 122, 198, 497 

Van Zaut, origin of name, 191 

Vealtown, the night of Lee's capture, 343; 

Pa. mutineers at, 530; Bullion's Tavern at, 

537 
Vegetables of last century, 236 
Veghte, John V., 111. 
Vendues in the olden time, 515, 610, 616 
Vergennes, Count de, 482, 546 
Verplanck, Abm. I. and Catalyna, 189 
Village greens, 207 
Violent William, 120 
Vimejoux, M. Jan Louis de, 342 
Volser, Jacob, 94 
Von Bulow, D., 152 
Von Heeringen, Col., 315 
Von BauHer, Christopher Wilhelm. 69 
Voorhees, Capt. Peter V., 506, 507 
Voorhees, Coert Van, 179, 187, 190, 191 » 
Voorhees, Gan-et, 506 
Voorhees, Jaciiues, 235 
Voorhees, John, of Bedminster, 286 
Voorhees, John D., 173 
Voorhees, Minnie, iw, 190 
Voorhees, origin of name, 191 
Voorhees, Ralph. 100; 179, 180, 2S0, 260, 619 
Voorleeser, 2.'j3 
Vreeland Family, 118 



742 



Index. 



Vroom, John. 594 
Vroom, Peter D., 439 

WADDISGTON, French minister. 181 
Wajfon traffic 229. 584 

Waldeck, Prince of. troops from. 354 

Walker, Capt. Benjamin. 473, 487 

Walking- Treaty, n1 

Wallace House, 455, 456, 476 

Warne, Thomas, 112 

Washinirton, George, meets Germans in Va._ 
in 1748. 44 ; as Pres. of a lottery scheme, 174 : 
his ride to first continental cong-ress, 285: at 
Phcenix tavern, 290; takes command of 
army, 291: extols N. J. militia, 311, 525; let- 
ters as to the disaffected, 329 : equipoise of .in 
face of adversity, 347; treatment of Hes- 
sians, 359, 363; letter about Hessian deser- 
tions. 368; Hessian coaehman of, 370; at 
Assunpink, 373: at battle of Princeton. 378; 
at Millstone after Princeton, 382; in 
Plnckamin after Princeton, 383; Aaron 
Malick's description of, 385; at Morristown 
in 1777, 390; at the Old Stone house, 391; 
appearance in the saddle. 381, 392, 485, 488; 
the workVs testimony of, 392; hife quarters 
at Morristown in 1777, 394 ; meets his wife at 
Pluckamin, 396; letter to Gov. Cook, 393; 
talents as a Keneral,393; hunts with Muh- 
lenburg-, 413; at Middlebrook in 1777, 415- 
422; at Hopewell Council. 450; headquarters 
at Somerville in 1779. 455; orders queens- 
ware, 466; behavior at dinner, 456; corres- 
pondence \vith Living-ston in 1779, 457 ; his 
enlogj- of Greene, 459; regards for Mrs. 
Greene, 460: at the Pluckamin Fete. 467,468; 
at Staats House, Bound Brook,' 463, 487 ; his 
"Lowland Beauty." 479: M. Gerard's im- 
pressions of, 482; at Bound Brook Review, 
486; his servant "Bill," 488; letter of, to 
conaistories of Raritan church, in 1779, 489; 
at Princeton in 1783. 495; at Morristown in 
1780, 516; at Morristown, review. 517; at 
Connecticut Farms and Springfield, 523; 
winter quarters in 1721, 528; quells Jersey 
line meeting, .531 ; deluding Sir Henry Clin- 
ton in 1781 , 6,34 ; in Bedminster on the way to 
Virginia, 535; compliments Count de Fer- 
Bon. 540; at Mount Vernon in 1781, 541: let- 
ters regarding Captain Asgill, 545, 546 

Washington, appearance and character of, 
285.347, 370, 381.385. 391, .392, 393, 456, 469, 482, 
4H6 

Washington, Mrs. George, reaches Morris- 
town Camp in 1777. 395: her annual visits at 
headquarters 396: at Pluckamin in 1777, 
397; her life at Morristown, :«t7: travelling 
expenses in visiting camp, 398; at Camp 
Middlebrook in 1779, 455, 456; at the Pluck- 
amin Fete, 467: knits a (pieue net for Col- 
fax, 477; false alarms at headiiuarters, 479: 
at Bound Brook Review, 484: at Morris- 
town in 1780, 516, 524 

Waehingtonian Movement, 623 

Waterloo, 616 

Watkey, Henry, 291 



Watson Brook. 221 

Watson. Klkanah, 590 

Watson, John, 210 

Wayne, Gen'l Anthony, at Phoenix tavern, 
290; proMioted brig.-gen'l, 414; letter in 
1777 from Mount Pleasant, 419; encamps at 
Middlebrook in 1779, 460; surprised at 
Paoli, 466; at Bound Brook review, 485; at- 
tacks Stony Point, 492; quells Pa. line 
mutiny, 528-31 ; in Virginia in 1781, 533 

Weddings, observances and laws relating to. 

243 

Weedon, Col. and Gen'l, 375, 414 

Weiss, PhiUp, of Zion Ch., 82, 90 

Welcome, ship, her arrival with William 
Penn, 51 

Wesley, John, " Calm address" of, 331 ; prim- 
itive physick of, 568; stigmatizes rum sell- 
ers, 620 

West. Ann, 130. 131 

Westfield. Revolutionary devastation at, 433 

West Indies, slaves in, 224 

West Jersey, settlement of, 110; partition 
from E- J., Ill; government transferred to 
crown, 120 

West, John, 131 

Westminister, Treaty of, 110 

Weston, fight at, 399 

Weston, mills established at, 179 

West, Robert, 112 

Weygand, Rev. Job. Albert, of Zion Ch., 82 

Wharton, Robt.. 120, 131 

Whetten, Mrs. Captain, 361 

^Miippany, N. J., 536 

Whitaker, John, 108 

^^^litefield, George, 431 

Whitehead, William A., 114, 119, 125. 127, 194, 
210. 211, 221, 617 

White House, 75, 694 

White, Philip, 543, 544 

White Plains, battle of, 317 

\S1iite, Rev. Dr. William, 330 

^\■hite slavery in N. J., 148-153 

White's Tavern at Basking Ridge, 336, 341 

Wickes, Dr. Stephen, 568 

Wick's Farm, 513 

Wicks, Tempe, saves her horse, 526 

Widows, laws relating to, 244 

Wied. Count Frederic of, 36 

Wild beasts, 62, 67 

Wilibrord, Missionarj', 628 

Wilkinson. Major James, 311, 342, »13 

William of Orange, 33 

William III. of England, 33 

Williams, Peter, 401 

Williamson, Genl., 395 

Williamson, James and Peter, 660 

Williamson, Lawrence, 187, 190 

Williamson, Peter, 173 

Williamson, William. 187 

Williamson's History of No. Carolina, 44 ; 

Willmott, Samuel, 267 

Willocks. Dr. James, 120. 122 

Willocks, George, Indian purchase, 100; mari- 
nes Margaret Winder, 120, 122; arrives in 



Index. 



•43 



N. J., 122: home of, 122; benefactions to St. 
Peter's, 124; buys Peapack Patent, 125; 
death and will of, 136 

Willocks, Margt., marriage, 122; death, VU 

Willot, Thomas, 430 

Wilson, Capt. Eobt. and Mrs., 398 

Wilted Grass, 102 

Winder, Margaret, marries George Willocks 
120. 122, 130; death of, 124; buys Somerset 
land, 130 

Winder. Sam'l. 120. 122 

Winfield, Charles H., 119 

Winningen. 2.5. 628 

Winslow. Betsy and Sallie, 465 

Winterbottom's history of America, 568 

Wintersteen, James, 5% 

Witherspoon, Kev. John, at second cont'l con- 
grees. 295; record of, 296; at prov'l congress, 
297; rebukes Gov, William Franklin, 300; 
home of, in Scotland, 379; his dress in con- 
gress, 442; at Phila. Synod in 1775, 442: ques- 
tions Mrs. Jay's complexion, 477; aids in 
forming constitution. 551, 552 

Wolfenbruttel. emigration from, 37 

Women, occupation on farms, 239, 242 

Woodbridge, N. J., settlement and origin of 
name, 108, 184; assembly meets at, 110; con- 
dition in 1682, 117; first Sunday-school in, 
440; religious condition in 1717, 498 

Woodbridge, Rev'd John, 108 

Wood frolics, 239 



Wood, Rev'd Mr., 193 
Woods, Dr. Leonard, 618 
Woodstock, Va., 84 
Worms, destroyed in 1689, 36 
Worth, Richard. IOh-109 
Wortman, Johnnes David, 630 
Wortman, John, 164, 286, 289, 290, 384 
Wortman, Widow, 597 
Wrangel, Charle* Magnus, 87 
WyckoS', Cornelius M., 249 
Wyckoff. Peter, 560 

YELLOW Fever in Phila., 63 
Yombo, 608, 612 
York, Duke of, his grant of N. J., 104; second 
grant of N. J., 110; grant to 24 props., 112; 
patents Monmouth to Richard Stout, 117; 
York road. The, 203 
Yorkto\\Ti, surrender at, 365, 367. 406, 482, 491, 

532, 538, 541 
Y^ungstraem, Prof. Kalm's companion, 57 

ZENGER Johanna, her arrival in Amer- 
ica, 46 
Zenger, John Peter, his trial for libel, 46 
Zion Lutheran Church, New Germantown, 
N. J., when founded, 76; the lease of church 
lot, 77; Father Muhlenberg's connection 
with, 80; its various ministers, 81-99 ; let- 
ters from Father .Vluhlenberg to, 83-86 ; 
the congregation in 1773,87; extracts from 
Its archives, 7T. 86, 91, 92, 93 




{^-^^ ^^^P 



ERR^T^. 



Page C— First paragraph; for "cheery-cheeked." read cherry-cheeked. 

Page 31— Seventh line from end ot first paragraph; for " were" appalling read 
was appalling. 

Page 57— Second paragraph ; Professor Kalra's visit to Philadelphia was in 1748, 
not 17-28. 

Page 104-^Eleventh line of second paragraph; for "Cartaret" read Carteret. 

Page 277- First line of second paragraph; for "fourth " child read sixth child. 

Page 390— First line of third paragraph ; for the " company " met read the commit- 
tee met. 

Page 414— Seventeenth line of second paragraph ; for " DeBoore " read DeBorre. 

Page 454— Ten lines from end of second paragraph ; for "J. Galloway " read Samuel 
Galloway. 

Page 541— First paragraph; it was after midnight on the twenty-third, not the 
twentieth, that Lieutenant Colonel Tench Tilghman reached Philadel- 
phia bringing the news that Cornwallis had surrendered on the nine- 
teenth. 

Page G29— Twelfth line of fourth paragi-aph ; omit " he standing godfather in 1712 
for her son Johan David (XVII.)"; second line below, for " Johan 
Peter (XIX.) ' read (XXVIII.) Johan Peter (C). 

Page 656 — For " Marie Catherine " (A 7) read Marie Cathrine. 

Page 660— In caption of page for " Himrod " read Kyan. 

Page 671— Andrew (8) was born in 1751, not in 1759. 

Page 682— Maria Catharine (3); her husband John Henry MflUer (Henry Miller) 
was not active in the affairs of Zion Lutheran Church at New German- 
town, N. J., he being of the Gei-man Reformed persuasion. See p. 87. 

Page 689— James (28-IV.) has six ch., the eldest being Bernhardt Kennedy, b. 1 June, 
1846, m. 18 Oct., 1876, Frances C, dau. of Cornelius Perry, M. D., of Win- 
fleld, Kansas. 

Page 691— Wm. and Mary K. King's (45-1.) one ch. Is not Abraham, but E. Brown; 
he m. Stella Ramsey of Paterson, N. J., and has 3 ch. The fourth 
child of John and Sarah Crown (45-11.) is not Buddie but David. 

Page 693— The one child of John Walter (61-VI.) is Victor Raymond, b. 31 May. 1887. 



I 



I 



^ 



■ffii 



